The Stars & Stripes blimp
went down shortly after taking off from Pompano Beach
Air Park, where it is based. Both people onboard were
trapped briefly while electrical crews cleared the site,
authorities said.

Bad weather may have forced the blimp down. There were
thunderstorms in the area at the time, authorities said.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was investigating.

"It went right over our building and was making
really loud noises," said Maryann Clark, general
manager of a nearby restaurant.

The blimp is one of three Goodyear blimps based in the
United States. Goodyear leases about 12 hectares at the
air park as a blimp base, the park's website said.

Comment:
There is something symbolic in the Stars & Stripes
blimp going down in a thunderstorm. Thankfully no one
was killed. It brings to mind the May 6, 1937 explosion
of the zeppelin the Hindenburg
at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Hindenburg disaster came
four years after the Reichstag fire and two years before
the invasion of Poland that set off the Second World War.
The crash of the Star & Stripes comes four years after
9/11.

Californians have experienced a troubling cluster of
earthquakes this week.

A 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Thursday night off
the coast of Northern California just days after a larger
temblor in the region generated a tsunami warning that
sent residents scrambling.

A magnitude-5.2 quake shook the Anza area of Riverside
County in Southern California on Sunday. A temblor of
magnitude 4.9 hit earlier Thursday near Yucaipa in San
Bernardino County in Southern California.

Hurricanes are likely
to get more extreme as a result of climate change, say
scientists.

Computer models of the Earth's water
cycle suggest that hurricanes will intensify as warmer
temperatures draw more ocean water into the atmosphere.

The research follows a record number of hurricanes affecting
Florida and typhoons striking Japan last year.

Kevin Trenberth, a researcher at the National Centre
for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who led the research,
said warmer seas and increased atmospheric water vapour
would add energy to the showers and thunderstorms that
fuel hurricanes. "Computer models also suggest a
shift ... toward extreme hurricanes," he said.

Most of the hurricanes that strike the US coastline
are formed in the tropical north Atlantic, where sea-surface
temperatures over the past decade have been the warmest
on record.

"Over the 20th century, water vapour over the global
oceans increased by 5% and that probably relates to about
a 5% increase in intensity and probably a 5% increase
in heavy rainfalls," says Dr Trenberth, whose research
is published today in Science. "That relates directly
to the flooding statistics."

Present models suggest a 7% increase in the moisture
in the atmosphere for every degree celsius that the earth
warms. As the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases
and global temperatures rise, so the amount of water in
the atmosphere goes up.

However, the effect of climate change on hurricane numbers
and landfalls is uncertain, said Dr Trenberth.

Models disagreed on how global warming might affect the
wind sheer that can either support or discourage hurricane
formation.

The number of hurricanes and typhoons tends to hold steady
from year to year. When activity increases in the Atlantic,
it often decreases in the Pacific, and vice versa. So,
it is hard to make long term predictions on the number
of storms or how they will move.

"There is no sound theoretical basis for drawing
any conclusions about how anthropogenic climate change
affects hurricane numbers or tracks, and thus how many
hit land," said Dr Trenberth.

With annual sales of 1.8 trillion cigarettes, the Chinese
monopoly is responsible for almost one-third of all cigarettes
smoked on the planet today.

If you believe the official website of the tobacco monopoly,
cigarettes are a kind of miracle drug: solving your health
problems, helping your lifestyle, strengthening the equality
of women, and even eliminating loneliness and depression.

"Smoking removes your troubles and worries,"
says a 37-year-old female magazine editor, quoted approvingly
on the website. "Holding a cigarette is like having
a walking stick in your hand, giving you support.

"Quitting smoking would bring you misery, shortening
your life."

Such statements are widely believed in China. [...]

Comment:
The rest of this story is an anti-smoking diatribe. For
the other side, check out this....

The purpose of this
website is to assist you in writing a persuasive letter
to a friend, a family member or a local legislator, a
letter which will persuade that person to quit being an
anti smoking health nazi.
This site will provide a wealth of facts, and ideas for
presenting them in a persuasive manner.

1) Comprehensive anti-smoking campaigns were
invented by the Nazi Party of Germany:
Yes, THAT Nazi Party - the one responsible for World War
Two, the one that was responsible for the murders of as
many as 6 million Jews and possibly 10 million other innocents.
The one that systematically murdered persons with deformities
and other physical or mental disabilities, within their
own country's population.
This fact was first made public by Professor Robert Proctor's
"The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little
known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45".
Proctor reveals that members of the medical profession
in Nazi Germany were instigators, enablers and purveyors
of all manner of horrific and murderous schemes - and
were also fanatical anti-smoking campaigners;

"Medical historians in recent years have done a
great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and
public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half
of all doctors joined the Nazi party and that doctors
played a major part in designing and administering the
Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, "euthanasia,"
and the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies."

"Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement
in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical
and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove
a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents
of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco,
the three major fascist leaders of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini,
and Franco--were all non-smokers."

2) Anti smoking health nazis twist, distort and
betray the noble principles upon which the medical sciences
are founded:
Those principles have always held that the treatment of
sick and injured persons is the sole focus of a physician's
work. The original Hippocratic Oath specifically forbids
medical professionals from concerning themselves with
their patient's personal affairs or revealing such matters
to others.

By contrast, anti smoking health nazis are intrusive
busy-bodies and gossips, self-appointed managers of other
people's personal affairs. Rather than treating the sick,
health nazis advocate "preventing illness" and
"promoting wellness" by inventing ways to force
people - who are not even ill - to live their lives in
ways health nazis claim will be least likely to result
in illness.

Anti smoking health nazis perversion of the centuries-old
approach to medicine - helping the patient live his life
in the manner that suits him best by treating whatever
illness might arise from the patient's choices - into
a doctrine of controlling potential patients and sabotaging
their ability to live their lives by their own free choices,
twists the noble medical caduceus into this;

3) Anti smoking health nazis STINK!:
Health nazis give off a foul reek of self-righteousness.
The stench of their arrogant claims to know better than
you do, what is best for you in your life - and the putrid
odor of their hypocrisy in claiming to care about the
wellbeing of people that they are doing everything they
can, to tax into bankruptcy, to alienate from their friends
and family, to turn into social outcasts and ban from
public view entirely - this stink not only guarantees
health nazis will be the last ones asked to dance at a
party, but also clings to anyone they associate with.

4) Anyone who believes that forcing their friends
and loved ones to give up freely chosen behaviors will
"save their lives", is hopelessly deluded:
You can't save someone's life unless they are in immediate
danger of dying! Paramedics sometimes save lives, as do
surgeons, police officers and firemen. Busy-bodies who
harass people they know to quit smoking, lose weight,
exercise more often, eat this thing, don't eat that thing,
etc. have never and will never "save someone's life".
Anti smoking health nazis' pathetic attempts to leech
off some of the glory that is rightly due to those who
really do save lives, demonstrates they must understand
- deep down inside themselves - that they are nothing
but annoying little non-entities with no life, and so
desperate to be 'important' that they would debase the
acheivements of true heroes in our society by falsely
claiming to "save lives" themselves.

5) Health nazis always come to a bad end:
History demonstrates that anti smoking health nazis end
up suffering all the financial loss, pain, public humiliation,
and social ostracism that they attempt to inflict on others.

The crazed fanatics who devised and ran Nazi Germany's
anti-smoking campaigns all got what was coming to them,
in the end. Robert Proctor says;

"Karl Astel, head of Jena's Institute for Tobacco
Hazards Research (and rector of the University of Jena
and an officer in the SS), committed suicide in his office
on the night of 3-4 April 1945.
Reich Health Fuhrer Leonardo Conti, another anti-tobacco
activist, committed suicide on 6 October 1945 in an allied
prison while awaiting prosecution for his role in the
euthanasia programme.

Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the guiding light behind Thuringia's
antismoking campaign and the man who drafted the grant
application for Astel's anti-tobacco institute, was executed
on 1 October 1946 for crimes against humanity."

6) Anti smoking health nazis CAN QUIT!
It is true that sticking your nose in other people's business,
trying to run their lives for them, and fascist impulses
to force others to conform to your personal ideals about
"healthy living" are all as addictive as heroin
or cocaine use.

There is hope, however! You don't have to go on being
a pointless pain in the backside to everyone you care
about. You really can quit being a health nazi.

Overcoming the addiction to these anti-social and self-destructive
behaviors is actually quite simple, but requires committment
and perseverance. Here are some things you can do to become
a normal person once again;

- Stop making rationalisations for interfering in other
people's lives. Recognise that there is no rational justification
for your health nazi behaviors, and that these behaviors
are driven by deep-seated feelings of your own worthlessness.

- Stop trying to make yourself look and feel important
by riding on the coat-tails of genuine health heroes.
Confront the delusion that health nazi behaviors can "save
people's lives" and accept that you can be a person
of value and worth without ripping off glory that doesn't
belong to you. Stop telling yourself and others that your
health nazi behaviors have anything to do with saving
people's lives.

Comment:
We received the following from a reader. It gives a glimpse
into the ideologues who are bending and twisting scientific
research to serve their agendas:

Lately my days are like this: Morning
seminars either in the department of physiology or or
at the psychiatric institute, then afternoons in the
lab working on the genetic expression of dopamine receptors
in schizophrenia.

After reading the signs entry on
the brains of alcoholics I am reminded of two seminars
I attended. Both were presenting research results from
two vastly different labs. They don't say anything we
don't already know but they are interesting.

At the psychiatric institute the
researcher presented the results of her studies on smoking
and what it does to the brains of people with a genetic
mutation that causes poor conduction of electro-chemical
messages due to poor myelination of neurons projecting
to glutaminergic neurons. More so the mutation is in
one of the many genes linked with schizophrenia and
the cognitive deficits like poor sensory motor gating.
(BTW It seems smoking helps to reduce deficits by increasing
and maintaining the potentiation of these neurons.)
When she showed her data the room burst into discussion.

Many of the MDs and PhD said openly
that maybe we should reconsider the institution's smoking
ban by having smoking rooms for hospital patients suffering
from these cognitive deficits. Right now one hospital
in town has a smoking room. For me the issue explained
so well why a high percentage of schizophrenics are
heavy smokers because not only do they have this deficit
to contend with, they have cognitive deficits like,
poor behavioral flexibility and working memory due to
disrupted dopaminergic transmission as well. More interesting
is that non-schizophrenics could have the mutation and
it doesn't mean one can't learn enough to function 'normally'
only that it takes much more effort and time to learn
compared with one without the mutation and if they have
normal dopamine function, they will still want to smoke
because it makes up for the glutamate malfunction. The
response from the main funder of the research who dutifully
sits in on every lab update, was "you can't say
that." I only wonder if the researcher (an award-winning
one at that), will be brave enough to discuss some of
these issues if and when she publishes her results.

In another seminar I attended last
week at dept of physiology, another research discussed
her research that found a genetic trait that protects
smokers from the dreaded lung cancer we hear about.
She recounted how even though she is not a supporter
of smoking, that she could not omit this solid data
from her paper. However,the reviewers gave her hell
and she lost funding because it was seen as advocating
smoking, even though she said it only applied to those
with a specific version of the gene. She had to scramble
to find other sources and even used some of her own
money to continue researching lung and heart disease
because for a while the only ones willing to fund her
studies,which she refused, were the tobacco companies.
At least her paper made it to publication; the first
researcher I'm not sure will.

In essence smoking increases cognition
but you all know that already. For those interested
in dopamine, serotonin, glutamate and their implications
in disorders such as schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder
autism and the like the research is interesting. The
synapes of the former two neurotransmitters have been
an intense target area for the pharmaceuticals (prozac
anyone?). Also, the chromosomes # and position of these
genes that affect these neurotransmitters read like
a prime number game.

I am only now beginning to have a
better understanding of why the hyperdimensional genetic
engineers may have chosen those particular genes for
manipulation of our 'uplink'. They certainly know how
to use the primes.

A Palestinian medical
source in Bethlehem reported that a 70-year-old died
on Gilo checkpoint, near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

The source stated that Zahra Issa Zboun, 70, from al-Azza
refugee camp in Bethlehem, died after the Israeli soldiers
barred her from crossing into Jerusalem to conduct Friday
prayers at al-Aqsa mosque, in Jerusalem.

Zboun was waiting under the sun for several hours,
which increased the level of her blood pressure, especially
amidst the extremely hot weather in the area.

Soldiers forced Zboun, along with hundreds of residents
to wait under the son for longs periods without allowing
them to cross into Jerusalem.

Soldiers, and since early morning hours closed several
roadblocks and crossings in the Palestinian territories
barring the residents from moving between the Palestinian
area, in addition to closing the Rafah border crossing
leading to Egypt, and the Eretz crossing which leads
to the industrial zone in the Gaza Strip, and to Israel.

(ANTIWAR.COM) - What
is the first picture the term "occupation"
raises in our mind? Probably some kind of extreme violence
among civilians: lethal fire in the middle of town,
terrified kids in pajamas watching heavily armed soldiers
searching a house, a helicopter firing a missile in
the midst of Gaza. All these violent scenes do happen,
but they do not give an adequate picture of what the
occupation really looks like.

Very few people realize that
Israel has turned life in the occupied territories (Israeli
settlers excluded) into complete misery without any
need to fire a single bullet. A unique, invaluable
glance into the mechanisms that constitute this "quiet"
occupation, usually hidden behind the literal smokescreen
of violence, is given by the first annual report of
the Israeli human rights group Machsom Watch, presented
in a press conference in Tel Aviv last week.

West Bank Checkpoints: The Basics

Machsom – "roadblock" in Hebrew –
stands for a whole arsenal of obstacles spread throughout
the occupied territories: temporary or permanent roadblocks,
manned checkpoints or roads closed off by heavy cement
blocks, gates in the Wall, earth mounds, trenches, observation
towers. The least known but most
significant fact about these various physical obstacles
is that almost all of them are NOT "border checkpoints"
located between Israel and the occupied territories;
almost all of them are placed WITHIN the occupied territories,
hampering the movement from one Palestinian town or
village to another.

Within the last four years – signs were clear
enough in early 2002 – Israel made every movement
of every Palestinian dependent on Israeli permit. Incredible,
but true: a Palestinian wishing
to get out of (or reenter) his or her immediate surrounding
– a town, a village, a neighborhood, or just an
arbitrarily cut-off part of a village – has to
get a permit from Israel in advance and show it at every
Israeli-manned checkpoint.You
cannot just go to work, to do some shopping or business,
to school, to visit family or friends, to a hospital
– you have to go through one or several Israeli
checkpoints first.

The numbers are horrifying. The UN's Office for the
Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) counted in November
2004 not less than 719 (!) physical obstacles throughout
the West Bank. Machsom Watch reports that less than
70 of them were removed in the recent "calm"
period, some only to be replaced by the rapidly progressing
Wall. An army general reported that the 25 central checkpoints
under his command required 1,000 soldiers, and up to
5,000 soldiers are employed on special alerts (Ha'aretz,
July 22, 2003); no wonder the checkpoints are consistently
undermanned, resulting in endless queues.

None of the more than 2 million Palestinians in the
West Bank thus live more than a couple of miles away
from a roadblock or checkpoint. A short route through
the West Bank would inevitably take you through several
Israeli checkpoints, some of them five minutes' ride
from each other. Lucky to have gone through one checkpoint?
The next one is just a few minutes ahead, where you'll
have to start all over again.

Checkpoints are closed on Israeli, Jewish, Muslim,
and other holidays and public occasions, paralyzing
Palestinian economic and social life. Machsom Watch
reports that

"From March to May [2004], a closure was imposed
that included full encirclement in many areas of the
West Bank. The closure started for the Passover holiday,
continued uninterrupted until Israeli Independence Day
(several weeks later) and from then to the Likud party's
referendum, and it was finally lifted after the Final
Four playoff games."

A Personal Aside

When I was 18, I had my basic training with an Israeli
infantry unit notorious for its ferocity. The most difficult
aspect of the 100 days I spent there, in early 1983,
was not the physical hardship: it was bad enough, but
a piece of cake compared to the permanent stress caused
by the intentional, systematic policy of keeping the
new recruits under complete uncertainty. We had no idea
what might happen a few minutes later – would
we be taken to a lecture, a physical exercise, a meal,
or moved to a remote base? We were sent to bed late
at night only to be awakened half an hour later; a weekend
off at home would be announced and withdrawn several
times till Friday afternoon; and individual soldiers
would be punished for no clear reason. As
my officer later told us, the idea was to "break
us down as civilians in order to rebuild us as soldiers."
At least the first part was accomplished successfully:
The unbearable stress caused many of us severe mental
damage, like shock, identification with the aggressor,
or post-traumatic syndromes.

Through the Checkpoint

Machsom Watch activists say they have seen the idea
behind the checkpoints policy actually written in a
military document: Keeping the Palestinian population
under permanent uncertainty. Precisely
the same principle, then, used to "break down"
recruits during basic training, is applied to an entire
population, children and adults, women and men, sick
and elderly. The checkpoints are at the heart of this
policy.

The moment you start a journey through the West Bank,
you are no longer master of your time. You do not know
whether you'll be able to make it at all, nor even roughly
how long it will take. Due to "surprise checkpoints"
and checkpoints manned only during certain hours, you
cannot even tell how many checkpoints you'll have to
go through. Any checkpoint can be closed at any time,
without prior notice nor any indication whether and
when it will reopen. You can pass three checkpoints
on your way, only to be stopped at the fourth. Crossing
a checkpoint can take minutes or hours, due to unpredictable
queues. The army may also suddenly impose the notorious
"Stop All Life Procedure" – a total
freeze on movement that lasts for hours at a time.

Detention

Even when a checkpoint is open, individuals are exposed
to extreme arbitrariness and uncertainty. Having a permit
is a necessary condition to pass through the checkpoint,
but not a sufficient one. With a hardly noticeable gesture
of his or her finger, a 19-year-old soldier may decide
your document needs "inspection" and detain
you. Such a detention can take 20 minutes; but it can
also take several hours, during which you have to wait
in the unroofed Jora ("hole" in Arabic, "sewage
hole" in Hebrew), where you may be ordered to remain
standing, or to sit on the ground facing the wall. If
you are a bus driver, all your passengers will have
to wait with you. Your document may be sent for inspection
immediately; but it may have to wait until 20 or 30
other documents are accumulated and sent together. When
it returns with an OK, you may proceed; but some documents
often get lost in the process.

Who is detained? Here are some answers Machsom Watch
activists got from checkpoint soldiers: "Anyone
who looks stressed" (under these circumstances,
who wouldn't?); "Every ninth man"; "Everyone
called Mohammed"; "Everyone who wants to go
through my checkpoint." Arbitrariness incarnate.
Many soldiers refer to detention at checkpoints as a
kind of punishment or "educational measure,"
and even order those in charge: "Detain this guy
for a long time."

English Weather

Behind this system are myriads of human beings with
sometimes heartbreaking stories – the arrested
kidney patient, the beaten student. Some of these stories
clearly fall under abuse. Israel's
efficiency in turning Palestinian life into hell disappears
when complaints are to be processed: out of 100 complaints
sent by Machsom Watch in 2004 to several state and army
offices, 87 percent were ignored or insufficiently answered.
Two years ago, the army admitted that out of 1,200 "inquiries"
into checkpoint complaints, only 18 had led to military
police investigations; the rest – 98.5 percent
– had been shelved (Ha'aretz, July 22,
2003).

But it is important not to let the cases of abuse distract
from the "normal" routine: Palestinian daily
life is unbearable even on what Machsom Watch activists
call "an English weather," i.e., a usual day
without any exceptional event. If the roots of Palestinian
frustration, despair, and violence – "terrorism,"
if you like – are to be sought, the checkpoint
system is an excellent place to start.

Comment: It
is clear that Israeli government oppression of Palestinians
has little to do with security concerns and everything
to do with harassing and often murdering Palestinian
civilians and leaders in order to prevent them from
establishing themselves as a independent people with
a sovereign voice on the world stage.

Central to this goal is the continued portrayal of
any Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation as
"terrorism" when, in reality, resistance (including
armed) to an occupying power is a fundamental right
laid down in the article four of the third
Geneva Convention.

However, according to humanitarian law, in order to
lawfully use force in a conflict you must first be designated
a lawful 'combatant'. To be a 'combatant', you have
to belong to an 'armed resistance group' and that group
must belong to a 'party' to the conflict. It is in this
fact that we find one of the chief reasons why Israel
will NEVER willingly allow the creation of a Palestinian
state.

As long as Palestine does not have official state status,
any Palestinian resistance group cannot claim to be
a party in the conflict and must remain a simple independent
resistance group, or a "terrorist" group in
modern parlance.

Not only did the developed world oversee the theft
of Palestinian land in order to create the state of
Israel in 1948, but in continuing to refuse to lobby
for an independent Palestinian state, they ensure that
any Palestinian resistance to Israeli aggression is
delegitimised in advance.

The day that Palestine is recognised as an independent
state by the world (don't hold your breath) is the day
that Israel will no longer be able to bulldoze Palestinian
homes or execute Palestinian school children and claim
that they are "fighting terrorism". On that
day, Palestinian resistance will be legitismised and
the actions of the IDF recognised for the war crimes
that they are.

JERUSALEM - Israel
is to build an underwater security barrier on its coastal
border with the Gaza Strip in a bid to prevent infiltrations
from the sea by would-be Palestinian attackers, security
sources said Friday.

The navy-built barrier is expected to stretch nearly
one kilometre (about half a mile) out into the Mediterranean
Sea.

The first 150 metres will be a concrete wall with its
foundations buried into the seabed near the northern
Gaza Strip. A floating metal fence will then stretch
for another 800 metres, according to a report in the
English-language Jerusalem Post.

The barrier "consists of elements that are above
and below the water level," a security source told
AFP.

"In order to provide protection for the Israeli
homefront and in order to prevent infiltrations of terrorists
via the sea, the navy is establishing a security system
which will help stop such infiltrations and alert the
security forces," the source said.

When the Israeli military pulls out of the Gaza Strip
later this month, it will lose a naval base in southern
Gaza, which is home to a vast surveillance system. Some
have speculated that the impending base loss provided
the impetus for Israel to announce the underwater fence
project.

Israel is currently building a massive barrier across
the West Bank in what it also says is a bid to stop
attacks. The barrier has been hugely contentious because
it often juts into Palestinian territory, leading to
accusations that its real intent is to pre-empt the
final borders of the Palestinians' promised future state.

Comment: And
all because the Zionist Israeli government refuses to
agree to a just settlement with the Palestinian people,
preferring instead to continue to heighten tensions
and provoke the large scale war that now seems all but
inevitable.

If we look objectively at the psychology of the Israeli
Palestinian conflict we realise that the unreasonable
hatred and aggression that shown by the current Israeli
government towards the Palestinian people is, strangely
enough, a result and legacy of the illegal and unjust
theft of Palestinian land by previous Israeli administrations.
One might think that the majority of any resentment
would be the right of the dispossessed Palestinians,
yet this is not the case as the index of Palestinian
Vs Israeli fatalities shows. What seems to be the case
is that that the very fact of the continued existence
of the Palestinian people is a daily reminder, not only
to Israel but to the world, of the injustice upon which
the modern state of Israel was founded and indeed the
lie that is the Zionist biblical claim to Jewish specialness
and their claim to their "ancestral homeland",
bestowed upon them by the fictional Yahweh.

Like a murderer who has somehow subverted the course
of justice and walked free, those people who constitute
the power elite in Israel will stop at nothing to obliterate
the eyewitnesses to their crime. In the case of Israel,
there are approximately 2.5 million 'eyewitnesses' in
the occupied Palestinian territories, and Israel, aided
and abetted by the "Zionists" currently occupying
the halls of power in Washington, are preparing the
ground for a final solution that will allow them to
'clear' their collective conscience.

Last night, cspan2
ran the coverage of the meeting/hearing held by John
Conyers in a basement room in the House on Thursday,
June 16, 2005 at 2:30pm.

This "hearing" was held to determine whether
or not there is enough within the Downing Street Memo
to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush et al.
Joe Wilson, the career state department pro whose wife
was outed as a CIA Agent by the Bushies; Cindy Sheehan,
whose son was killed in Iraq and who is the head of
Gold Star Families for Peace; Paul Bonifaz, lawyer who
is head of AfterDowningStreet.org, who is spearheading
the legal end of the impeachment efforts, and Ray McGovern,
ex Cia analyst and head of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity, (and who seems to be reading the SOTT page)
were on the panel. Many Democrat Congressmen and women
were also in attendance.

All commented on how the Republican leadership of the
Judiciary Committee would not let them have a regular
meeting room and relegated them to the aforementioned
basement room which was small, cramped and apparently
warm. Also, they all mentioned how over 11 votes were
scheduled for the same time the hearings were on, which
was cited as a ploy to disrupt the meeting/hearing.
More than one congressperson directly said the republicans
are engaging in a cover up of the Downing Street Memo.

Now, what I came away with after watching the three
hour meeting is that these people are very strongly
convinced that they have a smoking gun in the form of
the Downing Street Memo(s), and that they are not going
to be sidetracked or stopped in their pursuit of Bush
and the fact that he lied to Congress and the American
people to get the war with Iraq underway. They are hell
bent on pursuing impeachment. After the meeting they
were to head to the White house to hand deliver Conyers
letter to Bush with the by now 122 signatures of congressmen
and over 500,000 signatures of citizens, as discussed
on yesterdays' SOTT page.

The Bush administration's refusal to respond to these
developments, and the very developments surrounding
the Downing Street Memo(s), lead me to think only one
thing: this whole episode is destined to shortly be
overtaken by events. What the events will be is open
to speculation, another large scale attack? Who knows,
but it just seems like Conyers is putting Bush in a
corner, and thus, who knows what will happen. If anything
untoward is going to happen, it seems it might be sooner
rather than later.

Senior Democrats are
calling for a full investigation into a memo that appears
to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of misleading
Americans into backing the war with Iraq.

Bush has always maintained that "the use of force
has been and remains our last resort."

But the memo, called the Downing Street
Memo, could be the first documentary proof that Bush deceived
the American people.

During a forum organized by the U.S. House Judiciary
Committee held to investigate the implications of the
memo, Rep. John Conyers said the document "means
that more than 1,600 brave Americans and hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqis would have have lost their lives for
a lie."

"Quite frankly, the evidence that appears to be
building up points to whether or not the president has
deliberately misled Congress to make the most important
decision a president has to make, going to war,"
said Rep. Charles Rangel.

The memo is based on a briefing given to British Prime
Minister Tony Blair and his top security advisers in July
2002, eight months before the war.

Labelled "top secret," the memo summarizes
a report from Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence,
who had just met senior Bush officials in Washington.

The memo says: "Military action was now seen as
inevitable."

That "Terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]"
would be used to justify the war.

But, the memo says, "the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Neither Bush nor Blair has challenged the authenticity
of the Downing Street Memo. But earlier this month both
said it is wrong.

"The facts were not being fixed in any shape or
form," said Blair.

"Somebody said we had made up our mind to use military
force to deal with Saddam [Hussein]," said Bush.
"There is nothing further from the truth. My conversation
with the prime minister was how we can do this peacefully."

A separate document says Blair pressured Bush to take
his case to the United Nations to give a legal justification
for the war.

Michael Smith, the reporter for the Sunday
Times who obtained the leaked memos, said that was a brilliant
case of misdirection.

"The whole business about going
to the UN is not to avert war, but actually to get an
excuse to carry out war. And I think that's the killer
document for me."

At the hearing, Democrats called for a congressional
investigation and some witnesses said Bush may have to
be impeached.

"It is a high crime to engage in a conspiracy to
deceive and mislead the American people about the basis
for taking the nation to war," said constitutional
lawyer John Bonifaz.

The U.S. media have given scant coverage to the Downing
Street Memo, so it may not have much of an impact in Washington.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed
the allegation in the Downing Street Memo. He said the
Democrats were "simply trying to rehash old debates
that have already been addressed. And our focus is not
on the past. It's on the future and working to make sure
we succeed in Iraq."

But what is having an impact is the surging number of
American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq. New poll
numbers now show that most Americans feel the war wasn't
worth fighting.

Comment:
We've talked a lot about the Downing Street memo. We think
that it is the evidence needed, as if more evidence were
in fact needed, to show that Bush's mind was made up and
the rest was theatrics.

Will it lead to Bush's impeachment?

If the coverage of Conyers' meeting from the Washington
Post is any indication, don't count on it... see the following:

If American progressives
think they have enough media clout to make a real issue
of George W. Bushâs possible impeachment over the Iraq War,
they should read the account of Rep. John Conyersâs rump
hearing on the Downing Street Memo that appeared in the
Washington Post.

The story by political correspondent
Dana Milbank drips with a sarcasm that would never be
allowed for a report on, say, a conservative gathering
or on a topic involving any part of the American political
spectrum other than the Left.

âIn the Capitol basement yesterday,
long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land
of make-believe,â Milbank wrote. âThey pretended a small
conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room,
draping white linens over folding tables to make them
look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name
tags and extra flags to make the whole think look official.â

And the insults â especially aimed
at Rep. Conyers â just kept on coming. The Michigan Democrat
âbanged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers
to call him âMr. Chairman,ââ the snide article said. [For
the full flavor, see the Washington Postâs âDemocrats
Play House To Rally Against the War,â June 17, 2005]

Washington Post editors â having
already dismissed the leaked British government documents
about the Iraq War as boring,
irrelevant news â are now turning
to the tried-and-true tactic for silencing any remaining
dissent, consigning those who wonât go along to the political
loony bin.

Those of us who have covered Washington
for years have seen the pattern before. A group without
sufficient inside-the-Beltway clout tries to draw attention
to a scandal that the Post and other prestigious news
arbiters have missed or gotten wrong. After ignoring the
grievances for a while â and sensing that the complainers
have no real muscle â the news arbiters start heaping
on the abuse.

Contra-Cocaine

A previous example is the way the major
newspapers reacted to Gary Webbâs San Jose Mercury-News
series in 1996, which alleged links between the CIA, the
Nicaraguan contra rebels and cocaine traffickers in the
1980s.

At first, the big papers were silent
about this upstart challenge to their long-standing dismissal
of the contra-cocaine issue as a âconspiracy theory.â
But when the story spread on the Internet and was taken
up by the African-American community, the major newspapers
lost their patience. They attacked the stories as nonsensical,
called blacks âconspiracy prone,â and destroyed Webbâs
career.

Rather than reexamining the contra-cocaine
evidence seriously, the New York Times, the Washington
Post and the Los Angeles Times simply cast the issue outside
the realm of rational discourse.

Even when the CIAâs inspector general
issued reports in 1998 stating that the contra-cocaine
connection actually was worse than had been known â and
admitting that the CIA had protected some drug traffickers
â the major media made only slight adjustments to the
contemptuous tone that had long surrounded the issue.

The Rightâs experience has been different.
After Richard Nixonâs resignation over the Watergate scandal
in 1974, conservatives recognized the political danger
that came from the mediaâs power to set the parameters
of permissible debate.

Now, the conservative media has the
power to inflict as much â or more pain â on the mainstream
media as the mainstream media can on conservatives. In
other words, between the Mainstream and the Right in Washington,
there is now a balance of fear.

Indeed, Dana Milbank, as the Postâs
White House correspondent, has drawn conservative ire
from time to time for not showing sufficient respect for
George W. Bush. But if Milbank were tempted to write an
over-the-top attack on Bush â like he did on Conyers and
the Downing Street Memo hearing â he would pay a high
price from retaliating conservatives who would accuse
him of bias and flood his editors with complaints.

Almost certainly, Milbank would have
second thoughts about such an article or his editors would
for him. Without doubt, the story would not have appeared
in the openly insulting form that it did when Democrats
and liberals were the target.

Though no one wants to say it, everyone
in mainstream journalism knows intuitively that there
is no real risk in ripping liberals. Most often, itâs
a win-win. Not only can you write almost whatever you
want, but it buys the journalist a measure of protection
from conservatives, who have a long record of costing
reporters their jobs.

Milbank, for instance, must know that
his putdown of the Downing Street Memo hearing means he
can wave the article in front of Bush supporters the next
time they criticize something heâs written about the president.

Dynamic

The reason for that part of the dynamic
is largely that funders on the Left â unlike their counterparts
on the Right â have chosen over the past three decades
to divert money away from media into other priorities,
such as âgrassroots organizingâ or direct-action projects,
such as feeding the poor or buying up endangered wetlands.

Sometimes this refusal by wealthy liberals
to âdo mediaâ seems so extreme that one has to wonder
whether â except perhaps for some indigenous tribes in
the jungles of Borneo â any group on the planet has less
a grasp of the importance of information and media than
American liberals do.

Even the Arabs â not usually known
as information pioneers â have learned how investments
in media, such as the satellite news channel al-Jazeera,
can change the political dynamic of an entire region.

Though there have been a few positive
developments in liberal media â particularly the growth
of AM progressive talk radio at Air America and Democracy
Radio â Left funders still show few signs of understanding
how valuable media could be to a liberal political renaissance.

The latest trend in liberal grant-giving
has been for âmedia reform,â such as trying to âsave PBSâ
even as it adds more and more conservative programs. But
the Left funders still shy away from the construction
of media outlets and the creation of independent journalistic
content.

Without that strong media, liberals
can do little more than gnash their teeth when the Washington
Post and other mainstream news outlets banish issues like
the Iraq War deceptions beyond the bounds of Washington
debate. [For more on the Postâs treatment of this issue,
see Consortiumnews.comâs âLMSM
â the âLying Mainstream Media.â]

Certainly, any thoughts about impeaching
Bush are little more than pipedreams given the reality
of todayâs national media. In that sense, the Postâs attacks
on the Downing Street Memo hearing should serve as a splash
of cold water in the face of the American Left.

While Web sites and progressive talk
radio have helped puncture the image of Bushâs invulnerability,
a much broader media infrastructure would be needed if
issues, such as the Iraq deceptions, are to be forced
consistently into the national debate.

Comment:
What's with this? Ridicule because these people want an
investigation that should have happened years ago? From
the Washington Post, that brave and courageous paper that
broke Watergate, leading to the demise of the despicable
Richard Nixon? Watergate served a great purpose in promoting
the ideal of the investigative journalist and the power
of the press to ensure the overthrow of corruption when
the Republic goes bad. Trouble is, that was over thirty
years ago. Where are they now? They are the propaganda
voices of the White House.

Reading the day's news from the US leaves when with the
strong impression of a country completely isolated from
the rest of the world. Its view of itself and its view
of the rest of the world is so different from the reality
that if it were a person, this person would be locked
away for being delusional. But like any psychopath, it
can be charming. US culture is the charm that is seducing
people the world over: its music, its television, its
movies. Like the psychopath, it has a thousand stories
to tell that fascinate and seduce and lull the listener
while looking for ways to take advantage.

The ridicule thrown in the face of Conyers and the others
who are investigating the memo and the possibility of
impeachment is but another manifestation of the rot that
has set in. Without a free press there can be no informed
citizenry.
The
rise of the internet permits more voices to be heard,
but only to a marginal audience. The majority prefer to
sink into their couches and shut off their brains. In
a certain sense the memo doesn't bring anything new to
the table because it has been clear from the start that
Bush was saying whatever he needed to say to whip up the
American people to war in Iraq. That the press is dismissing
it, though, shows that they are willing and conscious
partners in this war, and in its crimes. If the guilty
are ever brought before a court, the owners and editors
of these papers should join them.

I was a soldier for most of the
time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement
from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served
in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments,
with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout
for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an
infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the
173rd Airborne Brigade.

I thugged around in eight different places in East
Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns
at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American
foreign policies ­ policies controlled, then as
now, by the rich.

In the course of that career, I heard everything you
have heard and felt everything you have felt about "loyalty."

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear
conversations recorded with you, I
hear many who have very serious reservations about these
wars of occupation. I had more than reservations
from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed
them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other
people around the world. [...]

And in these conversations that
many of you have with me and thousands of other people,
we hear you say ­ more and more often now ­
that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to
"do your job," because you are loyal to your
buddies; because you feel that you have to back
them up; and because if you don't go, someone else will
have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do
it out of respect for you, and because I care about
you, and because my own son is back there for his second
go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently
returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization
called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told
me, "My platoon sergeant
tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and
when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment.
He told us that 'the Geneva Convention doesn't exist
in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.'"
[...]

One of the ways they will get
you to do things that you will not want to live with
for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think
on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty.
And "what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq."
This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy
loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even
when they are trying to get you to violate the law and
not only the formal law, but to violate what you know
is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize
your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I'm telling you that you do not owe them or anyone
else that kind of loyalty.

They know that many of you know
that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies
about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds
over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and
then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver
democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many
of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation
out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC,
who are busy every day at home undermi ning the same
Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies
foreign and DOMESTIC).

They know that you know that plenty of the officers
are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on
their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by
risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they
know t hat they can't rely on the loyalty of many of
you to the chain of command any more either.

Where do they have to go with this,
then, after all? What do they tell you?

"You get out there on that Humvee, and face those
IEDs ­ together, as loyal buddies."

"You get out there and ransack people's houses
in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry
­ together, as buddies."

"You get out there and set up a road block without
Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation
where you are tense and don't know, and you shoot up
that car and kill parents in front of their children,
an d you have to live with that for the rest of your
lives ­ together, because you are loyal buddies."

"You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight
face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your
lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies."

That's the pressure you have on you
today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to
Iraq so someone else doesn't take your place.

But let's look at the bigger picture here, and for
that I'll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you
were born. We heard this same bullsh*t then. Almost
verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing
fac tors was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military got to the point where it
was no longer an effective fighting force, because US
soldiers quit taking orders. It
got to the point where an officer who was using his
men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the
wrong end of a Claymore mine.Now
I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop
this before it goes that far. [...]

A US Army sergeant
has been charged with murdering two officers in the
first alleged case of 'fragging' since the start of
the Iraq war.

Alberto Martinez, 37, is being held in a military jail
in Kuwait after being charged with the premeditated
killing of Cpt Phillip Esposito and Lt Louis Allen.
The three men served with the 42nd Infantry Division,
a reserve unit drawn from the New York National Guard.

A statement issued by the Pentagon said the officers
were killed by a blast in Tikrit, the birthplace of
Saddam Hussein, on 7 June. Initial
inquiries suggested an enemy mortar blast was responsible,
but further investigations found circumstances "inconsistent
with a mortar attack". The Pentagon has declined
to provide further details.

The case is the first of its kind involving US troops
in Iraq, although in April another army sergeant was
convicted of fragging (military slang for killing a
senior officer). Hasan Akbar killed two officers in
March 2003 by rolling grenades into their tent on the
Kuwait border as they prepared for the invasion. He
has been sentenced to death, the first US soldier convicted
of murdering a colleague in war since Vietnam.

A neighbour of Sgt Martinez in Troy, New York, said
he had just lost his home to a fire and moved to his
childhood home. His mother had died in recent years,
the neighbour said.

The bodies of the two dead men have been returned to
their families. Lt Allen was buried in Milford, Pennsylvania,
where he lived. Denis Petrilak, head teacher at the
George Baker High School, where the officer had taught
science for the past five years, said: "Today we're
just focused on Lieutenant Allen."

Cpt Esposito's mother said her son's wife, Siobhan,
and 18-month-old daughter, Madeline, deserved to know
the details of his death. He had wanted to be a soldier
since he was a boy, she said.

A family friend, Barry Lennihan, said he was a "very,
very solid individual". He said Cpt Esposito had
attended space camp as a boy and might have been an
astronaut if not for imperfect eyesight.

I still have my notes
from a man who knew all about torture, a Druze friend
in the 1980s, during the Lebanese war, pleased with
himself because he'd just caught two Christian militiamen
trying to plant a car bomb on the Beirut seafront. "I
saw two Phalangists over there. I knew who they were.
They had a bomb in their car. I called the PSP [Walid
Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party] and they took
them off for questioning." What happened to them?
"Well, they knew what would happen to them; they
knew there was no hope. They were questioned here for
a couple of days and then they were taken up to Beit
Eddin."

Ah, Beit Eddin, one of the prettiest villages in Lebanon,
the palace of the Emir Bashir, site of one of the country’s
finest music festivals – run by Jumblatt’s
glamourous wife Nora. But Eddin was different in the
1980s. “The guys are always told that they are
going to die, that there’s no point in suffering
– because they are going to be killed when they
talk,” my Druze friend told me. “There’s
a centre. They don’t survive. There are people
there who just press them until they talk. They put
things in a man’s anus until he screams. Boiling
eggs, that sort of thing. They kill them all in the
end. It’s only a few days and it’s all over.
I don’t really like that sort of thing. I really
don’t. But what can I do?

It’s a good question again now. What
can we do? What can we do when an American president
dispatches “suspects” to third world countries
where they will be stripped, wired up, electrocuted,
ripped open and tortured until they wish they had never
be born? What can we do with a prime minister
– ours – who believes that information from
tortured victims may be of use to us and may be collected
by us? How can we clean our hands when we know that
men are being subject to “rendition” through
our own airports? Doesn’t
a policeman have the right to go aboard these CIA contract
jets that touch down in Britain and take a look at the
victims inside and – if he believes the man may
be tortured – take him off the plane?

I started thinking about this in the beautiful little
town of Listowel in Co Kerry – not far by chance,
from Shannon airport – where I went to give a
talk at the recent writers festival. I was handed a
flyer by a bearded man in the audience. “Who was
on board the CIA-chartered plane Reg No N313P that landed
at Shannon on December 2003 en route from Iraq?”
it asks.

Now, a little fast checking suggest that the Tralee
anti-war group got the details right. And planes have
also gone in the other direction – to Uzbekistan
and Egypt and other countries where the Geneva Conventions
– already disregarded by the lads and lassies
in charge of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – are used
as lavatory paper. In Uzbekistan they boil “suspects”
in fat. They take out their nails. In Egypt, they whip
prisoners and sometimes sodomise them. In one Egyptian
prison complex a local human rights group found that
guards forced prisoners to rape each other. But
no friendly Garda walks up to find out who’s aboard
at Shannon. The Irish government will not investigate
these sinister flights. Outside, Irish eyes may be smiling.
But they won’t be allowed a peek into these revolting
aircraft.

It’s not difficult to trace
our journey to this perdition. First, we had
Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, who in November 2003 was
ranting away at a joint press conference with George
Bush, “in the face of terror there must be no
holding back, no compromise, no hesitation in confronting
this menace”. In tandem with this drivel, we had
writers such as David Brooks at the New York Times perniciously
asking readers what would happen to “the national
mood” when “the news programmes start broadcasting
images of brutal measures our own troops will (sic)
have to adopt… The president
will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world,
that we have to take morally hazardous action…”
Indeed.

Already there’s an infamous case in Canada of
a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was transiting the
United States, who was arrested and put on a plane to
Damascus where he was duly tortured until the Syrians
decided he had nothing to tell them. Then he came back
to Canada – only to find that the Canadian authorities
might have tipped off the US spooks that he was a wanted
man. Now I’m quite an expert on Syrian torture.
A beating is about the best you can expect. But
there exists in one of their “mukhabarat”
basements an instrument known as the German chair, installed
long ago by the now defunct German Democratic Republic.
The victim is strapped down and the back then moves
inwards until the prisoner’s spine is snapped.
A homemade version – the Syrian chair –
was nastier. It broke the prisoners back more slowly.

And as we all know – and
Saddam’s torture boys were also experts at this
– prisoner’s families can be brought to
prisons to be beaten, raped, and sodomised if the inmate
still refuses to talk.
With all this are we now complicit.
As long as we send men off to this to this physical
hell, we have the electrodes in our hands; we are the
torturers. As long as our government accepts information
drained out of these emasculated creatures, it is we
who are pulling out the fingernails; it is we who are
holding the whips.

Mind you, our
American friends are already, it seems, dab hands at
smearing prisoners with excrement and beating them and
– given the evidence I’ve heard from a prisoner
who was at Bagram in Afghanistan –
sticking brooms up men’s anuses.And, of course, just killing
them. Thirty prisoners have now died in US custody.
I don’t believe in the few bad apples line. It’s
happened on far too great a scale. And how do we excuse
this filth? How do excuse ourselves for this immorality?
Why, we say, Saddam was worse
than us.

Saddam had women raped; he shot them down into mass
graves. He was much worse. But if Saddam’s wickedness
has to be the tuning fork against which all our iniquities
have to be judged, what does that say about us? If Saddam
regime is to be the moral compass to define our actions,
how bad – how iniquitous – does that allow
us to be?

Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We
only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them
and murdered some suspects at Bagram and subjected them
to inhuman treatment in Guantanamo and sent others off
to be killed by our “friends” without the
embarrassment of being present. Saddam was much worse.
And thus it became the inevitable that the symbol of
Saddam’s shame – Abu Ghraib – subsequently
became the symbol of our shame too.

June 17, 2005 - Centuries
ago the Emperor of China would use on occasion what
is termed "Chinese Water Torture" whereby
the unfortunate victim would be lashed to a table and
a water would drop drip by drip hitting between the
victim's eyes. Not an especially gruesome torture, as
torture goes, but one by its relentless nature would
break the victim mentally.

Today the United States is undergoing a somewhat simliar
fate on a much grander and bloodier scale in its military
occupation of Iraq.

Yesterday a marine dies in Ar-Ramadi, today three soldiers
are killed in Tikrit, tomorrow two marines bite the
dust in An-Anbar and a soldier has an appointment with
Death in Samarra. Yesterday twelve American troopers
are wounded in Haditha, today five more wounded in Baghdad,
tomorrow seven in Mosul. Yesterday fortified base is
mortared, today a suicide car bomb explodes, tomorrow
a remote control roadside bomb detonates. Drip by drip
American blood, and Iraqi blood on a hundred fold scale,
water the burning sands of Iraq.

Fallujah is flattened, Al-Qaim is quashed, Al-Hit hit
by missiles. Houses blasted by tanks, orchards bulldozed,
innocent Iraqi citizens bound and hooded are trucked
to the bowels of American torture chambers. Yet the
next day Fallujah fights on, Al-Qaim battles back, and
Al-Hit is not "pacified".

At the bottom the grunts openly grumble and count the
days left of this futile "tour of duty", hoping
only to return home in one piece. Junior Officers voice
private doubts on the tactics and strategy, and just
as fervently as the lower ranks hope to come home alive.

Flag rank officers, eyeing their next star, wax optimistic
about the putative successes which occur under their
watch. Of course no officer of flag rank (Brigadier
General or Rear Admiral and above) has been killed or
wounded and given their position far from danger are
much more likely to be injured or killed by a drunken
fall than blown to bits by a bomb or shot in a firefight.

At the very top, is the bullshit water torture; whereby
the war criminals responsible for this catastrophe subject
the citizens of America to an unending barrage of pathological
lies, outright evasions, and pure bunkum. Perhaps in
telling so many lies, so often, they have come to believe
their hallucinations are reality.

The morale of the public sags, undermined by the obvious
daily carnage and anarchy which is contrasted by the
pollyanna pronouncements of victory in sight. Even the
most rabid of warniks and armchair generals have trouble
reconciling that rising casulties equal a promising
future.

The appeal of a glorious martial death fades and the
Armed Forces face a recruiting drought as young sensibly
understand that becoming cannon-fodder is not a bright
career move. Meanwhile another oil pipeline in Iraq
is destroyed yet again, and Congress is told that many
more billions of dollars are needed. Another day of
pounding blood and treasure into a sand-hole. Drip by
drip the Iraqi Water Torture grinds on.

The "Coalition of the Willing" is beset by
defectors, as the publics of Spain, Netherlands, and
The Phillipines, demand their governments withdraw their
troops from Iraq. Drip by drip, soon the only "allies"
left are either leaders that don't listen to their public
like Great Britian, Australia, and Japan, or leaders
who do not allow the public a voice like Azerbaijan
and Uzbekistan.

Such a torture may not be as graphic as breaking bones,
but in the end it breaks the sufferer far more effectively,
as the mere sound of water dripping brings to mind horrific
and unendurable memories. This is precisely the outcome
Chinese Emperors of yore desired.

It is also precisely the outcome the American public
must prevent before it erodes the very core of their
national soul.

On Thursday, President Bush stepped
to a lectern at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy
in Columbus to urge renewal of the USA Patriot Act and
to boast of the government's success in prosecuting
terrorists.

Flanked by Attorney General Alberto
R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism
investigations have resulted in charges against more
than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged
have been convicted."

Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush
and other administration officials, including Gonzales
and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize
the government's efforts against terrorism.

But the numbers are misleading at
best.

An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of
terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows
that 39 people -- not 200, as
officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related
to terrorism or national security.

Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor
crimes such as making false statements and violating
immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism,
the analysis shows. For the entire
list, the median sentence was just 11 months.

Taken as a whole, the data indicate
that the government's effort to identify terrorists
in the United States has been less successful than authorities
have often suggested. The statistics provide
little support for the contention that authorities have
discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here.
Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such
as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down
the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear
to have been involved in active plots inside the United
States.

Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism
probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to
terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.

Just one in nine individuals on the list had an alleged
connection to the al Qaeda terrorist network and only
14 people convicted of terrorism-related crimes -- including
Faris and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui
-- have clear links to the group. Many more cases involve
Colombian drug cartels, supporters of the Palestinian
cause, Rwandan war criminals or others with no apparent
ties to al Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.

But a large number of people appear
to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations
by chance -- through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances
or bad luck -- and have remained classified as terrorism
defendants years after being cleared of connections
to extremist groups.

For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them
Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts
for about 10 percent of individuals convicted -- even
though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties
to terrorism in 2001. [...]

Justice Department officials say they have not sought
to exaggerate the importance or suspected associations
of those prosecuted in connection with terrorism probes,
and they argue that the list provides only a partial
view of their efforts.

Officials said all the individuals were first put on
the list because of a suspected connection or allegation
related to terrorism. Last week, they also said that
the department had tightened the requirements for including
a case on the terrorism list.

Barry M. Sabin, chief of the
department's counterterrorism section, said prosecutors
frequently turn to lesser charges when they are not
confident they can prove crimes such as committing or
supporting terrorism.

Comment: In other
words, when prosecutors realise that they don't have
a leg to stand on, they find some other reason - any
reason - to keep the accused locked up instead of releasing
them. After all, you can't have a fake war on terror
without fake terrorists.

Many defendants also have been prosecuted for relatively
minor crimes in exchange for information that is not
public but has proved valuable in other terrorism probes,
he said.

"A person could not have been put on this list
if there was not a concern about national security,
at least initially," he said. "Are all these
people an ongoing threat presently? Arguably not. .
. . We are not trying to overstate or understate what
we're doing. You don't want to put language or a label
on people that is inconsistent with what they have done."

The Numbers

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department
database has served as the key source of statistics
on the status of terrorism investigations in the United
States and has been cited frequently in official speeches
and testimony to Congress. The list obtained by The
Post includes 361 cases defined as terrorism investigations
by the department's criminal division from Sept. 11,
2001, through late September 2004. Thirty-one entries
could not be evaluated because they were sealed and
blacked out. (The list does not include about 40 cases
filed since then that account for Bush's total of about
400.) The Post sought to update and correct data whenever
possible, including noting convictions or sentences
handed down within the past nine months.

The list of domestic prosecutions
does not include terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo
Bay military prison in Cuba or at secret locations around
the world. Nor does it include many of the approximately
50 people the Justice Department has acknowledged detaining
as "material witnesses," or three men held
in a military prison in South Carolina, one of whom
has been released. [...]

More than a third of the cases on the list arose from
a post-Sept. 11 FBI dragnet, which resulted in the arrests
of hundreds of Muslim immigrants for minor violations
unrelated to the hijackings or terrorism.

"What we're seeing over
time is the equivalent of mission creep: Cases that
would not be terrorism cases before Sept. 11 are swept
onto the terrorism docket," said Juliette
Kayyem, a former Clinton administration Justice official
who heads the national security program at Harvard University's
John F. Kennedy School of Government.
"The problem is that it's not good to cook the
numbers... We have no accurate assessment of whether
the war on terrorism is actually working."

Tracking Al Qaeda

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, many veteran U.S. counterterrorism
officials assumed that al Qaeda sleeper cells were hiding
in the country, awaiting orders to launch attacks. The
strikes -- carried out by 19 hijackers who arrived in
the United States and trained here undetected -- prompted
an aggressive campaign by the Justice Department, the
FBI and other agencies to identify al Qaeda operatives
on U.S. soil.

The results from the Justice
Department database, however, raise the possibility
that the presence of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers
within the United States is either limited or largely
undetected, many terrorism experts say.

Comment: Why should
the author limit our choices to "either limited
or largely undetected"? How about "nonexistent"?
Or "a massive deception"? If the shoe fits...

"These kind of statistics show that we really
don't know if they exist here in any significant way,"
said Martha Crenshaw of Wesleyan University in Connecticut,
who has studied terrorism since the late 1960s. "It's
possible that they could have sleepers planted here
for a long time and we could always be very surprised.
But I'd say that's less likely compared with them trying
to repeat a 9/11-style infiltration from the outside."

Other experts and government officials
say the relatively small number of domestic terrorism
prosecutions is partly the result of the administration's
strategy to handle some of its most dangerous suspects
-- such as Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed
-- outside U.S. courts.

As a result, only a limited number
of potentially significant cases have been pursued publicly
in U.S. courts.

Viet D. Dinh, a Georgetown law professor who headed
the Office of Legal Policy at Justice before and after
the attacks, said the primary strategy is to use "prosecutorial
discretion" to detain suspicious individuals by
charging them with minor crimes.

"You're talking about a violation of law that
may or may not rise to the level of what might usually
be called a federal case," Dinh said, referring
to credit-card fraud and other offenses. "But
the calculation does not happen in isolation; you are
not just talking about the crime itself, but the suspicion
of terrorism. . . . That skews the calculation in favor
of prosecution."

Bush administration officials have frequently compared
the strategy to the anti-Mafia campaign by former attorney
general Robert F. Kennedy, who vowed to prosecute mobsters
for crimes as minor as spitting on a sidewalk. But many
defense lawyers and civil liberties advocates argue
that the Mafia analogy is misplaced.

David Z. Nevin represented Idaho graduate student Sami
Omar Al-Hussayen, a Saudi national who was acquitted
of federal terrorism charges in a closely watched trial
last summer but agreed to be deported rather than fight
immigration charges. Nevin said there are key differences
between current counterterrorism cases and the prosecutions
of gangsters such as Al Capone, who was famously convicted
of tax evasion to get him off the street. "Everybody
knew that Al Capone was committing murders and was doing
all sorts of things. They just couldn't convict him,"
Nevin said.

"That's fine if you take it as a given that you
have the devil here," he continued. "The
problem is that you end up with people like Sami Al-Hussayen.
. . . Whenever you live in that realm, you're going
to make mistakes and you're going to hurt innocent people."

Using One Case to Build Another

In the end, most cases on the Justice
Department list turned out to have no connection to
terrorism at all.

Comment: Read
that sentence again...

They include Hassan Nasrallah, a Dearborn, Mich., man
convicted of credit-card fraud who has the same name
as the leader of Hezbollah, or Party of God. Abdul Farid
of High Point, N.C., was arrested on a false tip that
he was sending money to the Taliban and was deported
after admitting he lied on a loan application. Moeen
Islam Butt, a Pakistani jewelry-kiosk employee in Pennsylvania,
spent eight months in jail before being deported on
marriage-fraud and immigration charges.

And there is the case of Francois Guagni, a French
national who made the mistake of illegally crossing
the Canadian border on Sept. 14, 2001, with box cutters
in his possession. It turned out that Guagni used the
knives in his job as a drywall installer. He was deported
in March 2003 after pleading guilty to unlawfully entering
the country.

"His case had nothing to do with terrorism, as
far as I've ever been told," said Guagni's attorney,
Christopher D. Smith.

Some of the cases, however, remain murky. The question
of involvement in terrorism lingers even after formal
allegations of such ties have been dropped.

Consider the case of Enaam Arnaout, director of the
Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation,
who was indicted amid great fanfare in October 2002
for allegedly helping to funnel money and equipment
to al Qaeda operatives on three continents. The charity
was shut down.

Less than a year later, prosecutors
dropped six of the seven charges against Arnaout, and
he pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering
for funding fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. During
a sentencing hearing in August 2003, U.S. District Judge
Suzanne B. Conlon told prosecutors they had "failed
to connect the dots" and said there was no evidence
that Arnaout "identified with or supported"
terrorism.

The administration views the case differently. Bush,
in a speech Friday at the National Counterterrorism
Center in Northern Virginia, said investigators had
"helped close down a phony charity in Illinois
that was channeling money to al Qaeda."

Sabin, the Justice Department's counterterrorism chief,
said he could not discuss the specifics of most cases.
But he said one case in particular illustrates the government's
strategy: the conviction of Abdurahman Alamoudi, who
admitted to taking $1 million from Libya and using it
to pay conspirators in a scheme to kill Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah.

Alamoudi, who once worked with senior U.S. officials
as head of the American Muslim Council, has agreed to
cooperate with federal investigators as part of a plea
agreement. Sabin said the case is "a significant
success story" that shows how prosecutors can use
one case to help build others.

"We have been successful in obtaining information
and fueling our intelligence gathering efforts with
many of these cases," Sabin said.

Comment: Now
add to this charade the fact that many imprisoned terrorist
suspects have been tortured, and their "confessions"
are therefore completely worthless. It is clear that
the Bush regime's so-called war on terror is nothing
more than a war on the freedoms of both Americans and
peoples around the world.

BAGHDAD -- The manager of the addiction
unit at Baghdad's largest treatment center for substance
abusers took a long drag from his Craven cigarette and
offered his assessment of the drug problem in Iraq.

"There is no drug problem in Iraq," said
Abbas Fadhil Mahdi, a former brigadier general in Saddam
Hussein's army who is now a psychiatrist at the capital's
Ibn Rushud hospital.

"We have immunity against addiction," he
continued. "Islam protects people from indulging
in such illicit, harmful intake of substances. And unlike
in the West and in America, we have cohesive and supportive
extended families. So there is no problem with drugs."

Iraqi government officials and a U.N. agency that monitors
drug trafficking disagree. Hamid Ghodse, president of
the United Nations' International Narcotics Control
Board, said that since the U.S.-led
invasion in 2003, Iraq has become a transit point in
the flow of hashish and heroin from Iran and Afghanistan,
the world's largest producer of opium poppies, to Persian
Gulf countries and Europe.

Comment: Gee,
if the US invades Iran, they'll have full control of
the distribution and production of drugs destined
for Europe and the Middle East! But of course, it's
just a COINCIDENCE that, following the US invasion and
appropriation of the country of Afghanistan, the opium
production skyrocketed!

Under Hussein's authoritarian rule, alcoholism and
addiction to medications such as Valium were prevalent,
health officials here say. The use of illegal drugs,
a subject not discussed publicly, was thought to be
rare. But since the invasion, the same porous borders
that U.S. and Iraqi officials describe as conduits for
foreign insurgents have become well-traveled smuggling
routes for drug traffickers, according to U.N. and government
officials. As a result, the Health Ministry says, addiction
rates are climbing steadily.

High-profile drug busts, once unheard of here, are
becoming more common. On Wednesday night in the southern
province of Najaf, authorities arrested 20 smugglers
trying to move more than 1,500 pounds of hashish into
Saudi Arabia using pickup trucks packed with large barrels,
according to Brig. Gen. Hussein Ghazali, the border
police chief. The street value of the drugs, he said,
was nearly $10 million.

"The pattern is similar
to what we have seen in other post-conflict situations,"
Ghodse said at a recent news conference."Whether it is due to war or disaster, weakening
of border controls and security infrastructure make
countries into convenient logistic and transit points,
not only for international terrorists and militants
but also for drug traffickers. It is therefore all the
more important that both the government of Iraq as well
as the international community act swiftly and take
preventive measures before the situation escalates."

A statement released by Ghodse's agency in May said
"cases of drug-related intoxication are on the
rise in hospitals in Baghdad and around the country."

But interviews with health officials
here, and a visit with Mahdi, his patients and his staff
at the treatment center's 10-bed inpatient ward, indicate
that few, if any, drug addicts are seeking medical help
and that the Hussein-era propensity to play down the
problem remains.

Only three of the beds were occupied, two by alcoholics
and one by a user of Artane, a prescription muscle relaxant
used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. In his
two years at the facility, Mahdi said, he had not encountered
a single patient addicted to narcotics.

"They want to exaggerate that
there are addicts on many drugs," he said of the
Iraqi government. "It's for political reasons,
so they can say the countries surrounding Iraq don't
work to stop smuggling."

One of the patients on the addiction ward, Thamir Kamil
Ghassab, 36, said he had checked himself in to the hospital
and stayed for eight days because he was drinking more
than a pint a day of arrack, a Middle Eastern liquor.
He also popped Artane pills, he said. But
when asked if he knew of anyone who took narcotics,
he recoiled.

"Of course not, we would kill them," he said.
"Everything about it is wrong."

That long-standing stigma here
surrounding narcotics use discourages addicts from seeking
help, making it hard for the government to gather data
on drug use and addiction, said Sirwan K. Ali,
a psychiatrist at the Health Ministry who manages Iraq's
substance abuse control program.

Comment: Note
the contradiction between the above paragraph and the
views of the Iraqi government and the UN that drug use
and trafficking in the country have increased. How can
they make such a a statement if the Saddam-era stigma
makes it hard for the government to gather data on drug
use?

"The drug problem in Iraq is like the early part
of an epidemic, a rising storm, and if it increases
we cannot withstand the severity because we have no
infrastructure to control it, no experience in treating
it," he said. "But it is almost impossible
for us to know the size of the problem because of the
security situation and because it is kept in the dark.
Until recently, these things were not spoken about."

Even in the absence of much
hard data, the government is taking steps it
hopes will prevent the flow of drugs from escalating.
When it reestablished capital punishment last year,
it made drug dealing the only nonviolent crime punishable
by death. The Health Ministry has established committees
in each province to monitor what Ali called a "sharp
rise" in addiction rates and smuggling.

Last November, when the ministry held its first conference
on illegal drugs, it published an illustrated book,
"Drugs and Their Influence on Society," which
compiled national statistics on arrests and hospitalizations.
A drawing on the back cover showed a young man crouching
with an agonized expression as a demonic figure emerged
from the smoke of his cigarette.

But the assembled data reflected only a fraction of
Iraq's drug problem because reporting
from provincial health authorities and police was sporadic,
Ali said. For example, from May to November 2004, police
nationwide reported only nine smuggling incidents and
24 cases of people taking illegal drugs.

But police in several Iraqi provinces say drug arrests
have become increasingly common in cities, particularly
in Baghdad, Iraq's largest city with about 5 million
inhabitants, and in places frequented by religious pilgrims
from abroad such as Najaf and Karbala, which are home
to Shiite Muslim shrines. Ghazali, the Najaf border
police chief, said drug smugglers often bury their contraband
in the desert before transporting it into Saudi Arabia.

In its statement last month,
the International Narcotics Control Board said that
authorities in Jordan had noted a major increase in
drug trafficking from Iraq over the previous year and
that in April, 3 million pills of Fenethylline, a stimulant
with effects similar to amphetamines, had been seized
at the Iraqi border. "Significant quantities"
of cannabis resin and chemicals used to manufacture
heroin had also been discovered, the statement said.

For Iraq's security forces, perhaps the most unsettling
recent incident came in late May, when six Iranians
were arrested in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah with
what police said were large quantities of an unspecified
type of narcotics. About 50 gallons of a material described
in local news reports as "a precursor to explosives"
were also found at the scene, Iraq's al-Watan daily
newspaper reported.

Last October, 21 Iranians and Afghans were arrested
while trying to enter Iraq with weapons and illegal
drugs in their possession, border police in Sulaymaniyah
said.

"All of this is because the borders are not well
protected," said Waleed Sharka, a member of the
Iraqi National Assembly and one of the few politicians
to speak out publicly on the issue. "Now the terrorists
are bringing the drugs with them."

Comment: How
to explain this? Isn't the US government waging a war
on drugs?? Well, yes, war and drugs are part of it,
but the "on" word is not quite correct, it's
more of a war FOR drugs you see...

Retired DEA Agent
Celerino "Cele" Castillo III served for 12
years in the Drug Enforcement Administration where he
built cases against organized drug rings in Manhattan,
raided jungle cocaine labs in the amazon, conducted
aerial eradication operations in Guatemala, and assembled
and trained anti-narcotics units in several countries.

Cele appeared on the Alex Jones show and dropped the
bombshell that los Zetas, Mexican drug commandos trained
in the U.S. at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning,
Georgia to be the elite "special forces" of
the Mexican military are now murdering police and conducting
hits all over the South West US.

This partially came out in the national media last
week but the spin was that it was just a case of blowback
and that these US trained commandos had come back to
haunt their former handlers. The truth is that they
are still working for the US government in protecting
drug routes to keep the wheels of Wall Street oiled.

These commandos are working directly
for the Bush drug cartel in carrying out hits on rival
drug smugglers who aren't paying their cut. Witnesses
and innocent police, DEA and FBI agents are also being
murdered.

Here is the partial transcript from the show. Click
here to listen.

Cele Castillo: "That same blueprint they used
in Guatamala and in Vietnam they have now brought it
to Iraq and the same Colonel who ran the death squads
down in El Salvador Colonel James Steele is now running
those commando unit death squads in Iraq. So basically
we have the same individuals, same cell grups that were
in Vietnam that came to central America and Miami and
so forth and are now in Iraq and some of them are being
trained here in south Texas. There's warehouses down
here we're they're training more Zetas individuals that
work for the cartels.

Alex Jones: "Now for those that missed that, you
have evidence as a former veteran, peace officer and
then head DEA agent in Latin America and you live in
south Texas, that down there they are training these
los Zetas groups and again they're now targeting rival
cowboys that are not paying their cut, do you agree
with that statement?"

Cele Castillo: "Absolutely but not only that just
recently last month we had a female US customs agent
driving down the highway and a couple of individuals
drove up to her and just shot the hell out of the car
and she got hit on the ankle and they're not gonna take
any more prisoners. They're now gonna target FBI agents,
DEA agents and people that were able to get away from...."

Alex Jones: "And Bush has ordered the border patrol
to stand down there in the Tuscon sector because, this
was official, because it was cutting in on their drug
profits."

Cele Castillo: "Well exactly and now they're planning
to come to south Texas and they're gonna do the same
thing here in south Texas and there was a story just
today in the paper which says border patrol agents say
you know what we can't stop these people from coming
across the border and the reason that we can't stop
them is because our government is not letting us do
it."

Alex Jones: "Well I read in the Brownsville paper,
the Dallas Moring News you name it that they're conducting
murders all over Texas and killing police officers but
it's a national secret Cele, it's in regional papers....

Cele Castillo: "Well one of the most major things
that people don't realize that's going on is a lot of
these people getting murdered are informants for the
DEA and FBI and basically people don't wanna admit the
fact or let the public know that these people are informants
working for the government."

A popular Latin American artist
known for cheery, rotund portraits has included work
depicting the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib in a new
retrospective of his art.

Fans of Fernando Botero heading to the new exhibit
at Rome's Palazzo Venezia will still find paintings,
sketches and sculptures featuring the Colombian artist's
usual jovial and chubby images of everyone from presidents
to prostitutes. However the show, which opened Thursday
and runs through Sept. 23, also includes work from The
Horrors of Abu Ghraib, a series on display for the first
time. After reading about the abuse of prisoners at
Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison, Botero was immediately inspired
to channel his reaction - anger - into new works, he
said at a press conference inaugurating the show in
Rome.

"There are a lot of things that
hit me, but the torture at Abu Ghraib is something different,"
Botero, 73, told those gathered. "I didn't expect
it, like most people, like the majority of Americans,
this conduct from a so-called civilized country."

About 45 of the more than 60 works he has produced
since last October are on display in the new exhibit.
Botero said he drew from stories in The New Yorker and
other media for the series. One painting includes a
prisoner stripped from the waist down and another shows
prisoners, who have been dressed in women's lingerie,
piled on top of each other.

Botero said he hoped the series would
be a "permanent witness to a great crime"
like Pablo Picasso's mural Guernica, which invoked the
tragedies of the Spanish Civil War.

"The first thing I had to do was get it out of
my heart, but art has this capacity to keep on accusing
and I hope that will be the impact in the long term,"
he told Reuters.

When the retrospective closes in September, the Abu
Ghraib works will be exhibited in Germany and Greece.
A U.S. show is scheduled for 2006.

Though he refrained from being political in his art
earlier in his career, in 1999 Botero began creating
works about the drug wars and the related kidnappings
and shootings that affect everyday Colombians. Some
of these works have been shown in European museums.

WESTLEY: ' Well, Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted
to retire. So he took me to his cabin and told me his
secret. "I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts,"
he said. "My name is Ryan. I inherited this ship
from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you
will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from
was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either. His name
was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen
years and living like a king in Patagonia." Then
he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring
the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender
to the Dread Pirate Westley." '

-William Goldman, "The Princess Bride"

Bill Montgomery's "Form
over Substance" goes beyond expressing skepticism
about the shadowy stories coming out of Iraq about top
aides of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi being arrested. He suggests
that the stories are a combination black psy-ops operation
to influence public opinion, and scripted Hollywood entertainment
value. I would only add that it is now often forgotten
that the major politicians running Iraq are the same people
who lied to the US public about Saddam's WMD and about
Baath links to terrorism, etc. Vice-Premier Ahmad Chalabi,
Member of Parliament Iyad Allawi, and others told bald-faced
lies or provided to Western intelligence defectors who
told bald-faced lies. They told Tony Blair that Saddam
could launch a chemical weapons attack on Western interests
"within 45 minutes." Chalabi's lies and those
of his cronies would fill a multi-volume print encyclopedia.
How likely is it that now that they are running the Iraqi
government, we can suddenly trust everything their spokesmen
tell us? Yet the Western press dutifully reports these
allegations about the attrition against the Zarqawi network
as though it is gospel. I almost never refer to such reports,
because they seem to me obviously questionable and impossible
to verify, except that obviously someone continues to
go on blowing things up in Iraq despite Iraqi government
claims about all these arrests.

Meanwhile, Reuters
says that an internet site associated with the Zarqawi
network denies that any Zarqawi aides were arrested recently
in Iraq or in Spain, as had been reported in the press.
There is no way of knowing who posts these supposed communiques,
and there is every reason to be suspicious of the information
in them.

Comment:
We've been repeating it since the name Zarqawi was first
linked to Iraq: it is disinfo, a false flag operation,
most likely carried out by the Israelis.

June 17, 2005—In
the political battle between America's brainless and
its gutless, agreement seems clear on one issue. They
demand we remain in Iraq until the horrid mess we've
created becomes somehow uncreated.

Perhaps when an iraqi teenager takes
a gun to school and blows away a dozen classmates we
will leave, since they will have finally achieved our
level of democracy.

As the death toll and misery increase, the regime and
its echo chamber opposition join in stressing the need
for Americans to stay until we've corrected all our
mistakes, no matter what it costs the Iraqis. A call
for immediate troop withdrawal is, so far, drowned out
in the din of agreement between the dreadful regime
and its dismal opposition.

Will suicide car bombings have to
strike America before a majority of the opposition calls
for an end to this madness? Must we absorb more tragedy
ourselves before we understand how much it hurts others?
How many more lies will we tolerate before we demand
the truth?

The cover story for destroying Afghanistan
was finding Osama bin Laden—remember him? That
fable seems forgotten; the warlords never left, the
Taliban is back, the drug business flourishes, misery
prevails, and our stylishly upscale puppet leader and
his regime are helpless outside of downtown Kabul.

The bigger lies about Iraq's hidden weapons are now
as believable as its
secret plan to invade Cleveland. Should we assume
that those who produced these fables are not in jail
due to our cherished freedom of expression? Or is it
our incredible ignorance? Our
freedom does not extend to people of Middle Eastern
complexion who fit the terrorist profile formulated
by those who profit from this murderous idiocy, inspired
by godly revelation, performed with ungodly deceit.

Two years ago, the White House occupant boldly announced
"mission accomplished" to his troops. The
only accomplishment was a staged photo-op with heroic
leader wearing military drag, addressing a phalanx of
fawning media stenographers, with backdrop of young
warriors such as his wealth enabled him to avoid becoming
when he was their age. It was great viewing, for fans
of TV wrestling. But thousands
have died since then, civil society has broken down,
and a government of mostly former exiles has shown its
only value is lapdog obedience to American and Israeli
direction.

We have reduced a highly developed
secular nation with an educated middle class, to a near
anarchy of poverty, suffering and sectarian violence.
Our military occupation is hated by most Iraqis,
regardless of their politics or religion. The
sectarian breakdown of their country benefits three
forces: Christian fanatics who believe they are doing
the work of God; Jewish fanatics who believe they are
doing the work of God, and market fanatics who know
they are doing the work of God. While the religionists
plan their immaterial intimacy with the invisible king
of the universe, the corporados
get materially rich from rebuilding what their war has
destroyed, and cash in on a massive theft of national
wealth. But they are not alone in enjoying material
benefit from Iraqi suffering.

Israel is especially pleased
to see a once powerful Arab nation that refused to give
it recognition and aided the Palestinians, reduced to
chaos, division and weakness. It was Israel's
zealots among American policy makers who played a major
role in getting the U.S. to invade Iraq. But whether
one of these groups had more to gain should not be a
subject for debate. That all are in league is what matters
and must be confronted.

While the innocent are programmed
to fear Islamic fundamentalism, it is the fanatic forces
of Judeo-Christianity's most dangerous sects which are
the real threat. The lunatic liaison of evangelical
Christians, awaiting "his" rapturous destruction
of everything in the universe but them, with believers
in a Hebrew messiah and "his" real estate
promise of their very own domain, represents
a threat to humanity far more serious than alleged Islamic
fundamentalism.The temporary
unity enjoyed by these disturbed Judeo-Christians will
eventually end and find them at each others' throats
in their scriptural war of immaterial prophecy.
This could be good for humanity, if it only threatened
their perverted pipe dreams. But
given that these fanatics control the U.S. and Israeli
governments and their nuclear arsenals, they could destroy
everyone.

The staggering financial cost of this holy war has
contributed to a growing loss of faith in the American
government. Partisan battles over legislative procedure
take precedence over real problems for those who find
the cost of gasoline, health care and housing far more
important than spending billions to destroy Iraq. Or
raising millions for political combat over selecting
judges most people won't know or ever deal with. Dividing
the nation into fictional blue state and red state opponents
only makes sense to the minorities who actually participate
in the political party with two wings; the center and
the right. The majority of Americans work to support
this insanity with their tax dollars. They grow more
sickened by the power structure, and therein lies the
hope.

If we continue interfering in other people's lives,
Iraq, and the Middle East, will be in our cities, our
malls and on our highways. We need to avert the disaster
of religious lunacy and a maniacal political economy,
and take control away from forces bent on destruction.
We are ruled by people who should
be in an institution, not running it. Religious
believers in a God of love and secular believers in
a humanity of love need to take matters out of the hands
of irrational murders.

The reign of terror instituted by competitive fanatics
who worship a God of demonic fear, represents a threat
to the future of the human race. It must be so acknowledged,
and dealt with. We should begin that process by getting
all our troops out of Iraq. Immediately!

June 17 2005 - After
his American employers left and monthly food rations
began to shrink, Hussein Hadi started selling his furniture.
His bed was the last thing to go. Now Hadi, his wife,
sister, mother, two brothers, three children and a nephew
sleep on his living- room floor in Baghdad, their blankets
sewn from flour sacks. Some nights they fall asleep
hungry.

"Hope is small," said his wife, Zainab. Like
many Iraqis, the Hadis depend on food rations distributed
by the government. Sometimes the sugar they receive
has been hardened by rainwater and the rice is crawling
with maggots. The soap is so harsh it causes rashes.
On the rare occasions when the Hadis received all the
items - sugar, rice, flour, baby milk, tea, vegetable
oil and a few other essentials - they thought themselves
lucky.

The United Nations World Food Programme, which monitors
the distribution of rations, recently reported "significant
countrywide shortfalls in rice, sugar, milk and infant
formula".

Families in Baghdad have received no sugar or baby
milk since January. Newspapers have also begun reporting
that the tea and flour hand-outs contain metal filings
and that people have fallen ill after consuming food
rations.

Officials with the trade ministry, which is in charge
of distributing the rations, said the media have created
the crisis. But they have refused to release results
of the tests for contamination they said they are doing.
Retail agents who sell the food baskets say the ministry
is corrupt, a charge supported by Radhi Radhi, the government's
anti-corruption chief.

Mr Radhi said in a recent interview that trade ministry
officials had spread rumours of contaminated food to
discredit the current flour supplier and renegotiate
the contract. Some agents speculate that ministry employees
have added metal filings to cheat on the parcels' weight.
The same employees also sell tea and flour on the black
market, agents say.

Like the Hadis, many Iraqi families rely on the heavily
subsidised rations, which were previously distributed
under the United Nations' oil-for-food programme to
mitigate the effect of sanctions after the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait. After the removal of Saddam Hussein, the
programme was handed over to the trade ministry.

More than half of Iraq's population
lives below the poverty line. The median income
fell from $255 (£144, €211) in 2003 to about
$144 in 2004, according to a recent UN survey. Families
buy the food baskets for a few dollars at state-licensed
shops.

Ahmed Mukhtar, director-general of the ministry, blamed
the shortage of rations on security threats that created
bottlenecks at the borders with Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
"We're attempting to make sure the supplies are
safely delivered," Mr Mukhtar said. "Anything
that disturbs the food supplies is a critical situation."

Zainab Hadi said she and other women had been forced
to buy food at the market, pushing prices up. The cost
of tea and flour has almost tripled. At food markets,
a 35-pound can of vegetable oil, which just a few months
ago cost $4 - a little more than an average day's wage
- now costs $12. Mr Hadi recently lost his job as an
electrical engineer with US troops and now works as
a minibus driver.

Over the doorway of the Hadis' tiny house, a small
blue ceramic plaque offers praise to God. The 10 family
members share two rooms. The upstairs living room doubles
as a bedroom. In their kitchen, a poster of the Shia
Muslim martyr Hussein shares pride of place with a world
map. The fridge is largely empty. Sprite and Coke bottles
filled with tap water share shelf space with medicine
to relieve the aching joints of Hadi's widowed mother.

In Sadr City, a Baghdad slum into which 2m people are
crammed, the reduction in food rations is also taking
a toll. Intisan Karim, 26, lives with 24 family members
in a small house. If rations
continue to shrink, she joked, laughing without mirth,
"we'll start eating each other".

Outside sewage flowed along the streets;
goats gnawed on rubbish.

"The food basket is shrinking and the people's
hopes are also shrinking," said Amir Huseini, who
dealt with social issues in an office affiliated with
Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shia cleric.

"One or two missing items have
become three, four and five, until this point when the
really vital item - the flour - is also missing."

He had visited many families locally, trying to raise
morale and hope, he said, "although this does not
fill the stomachs of the hungry".

NEW YORK (AP) - A security breach
of customer information at a credit card transaction
company could expose to fraud up to 40 million cardholders
of multiple brands, MasterCard International Inc. said
Friday.

The credit card giant said its security division detected
multiple instances of fraud that tracked back to CardSystems
Solutions Inc., which processes credit card and other
payments for banks and merchants.

The compromised data included names, banks and account
numbers - not addresses or Social Security numbers,
said MasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin. Such data
could be used to steal funds but not identities.

It was the latest in a series of security breaches
affecting valuable consumer data at major financial
institutions and data brokers in an increasingly database-driven
world.

The breach appears to be the largest yet involving
financial data, said David Sobel, general counsel at
the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"The steady stream of these disclosures shows
the pressing need for regulation of the industry both
in terms of limitation in the amount of personal information
that companies collect and also liability when these
kinds of disclosures occur," Sobel said.

A flurry of disclosures of breaches
affecting high-profile companies including Citigroup
Inc. (C), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and DSW Shoe Warehouse
has prompted federal lawmakers to draw up legislation
designed to better protect consumer privacy.

CardSystems was hit by a virus-like
computer script that captured customer data for the
purpose of fraud, Gamsin said. She said she did not
know how the script got into the system. The FBI was
investigating.

MasterCard, which said about 14 million of its own
cards were exposed, first announced the breach in a
news release late Friday afternoon, saying it was notifying
its card-issuing banks of the problem. [...]

CardSystems, which has a processing center in Tuscon,
Ariz., has been in business for more than 15 years and
handles transactions for more than 115,000 small to
mid-sized businesses, according to the company's Web
site. The company says it processes transactions worth
more than $15 billion annually.

Sobel said the fact that the latest breach involved
a third party "indicates that this is a shadowy
industry where the consumer never really knows who is
going to be handling and using their personal information,"
he added. "Presumably, the affected consumers thought
they were dealing with MasterCard."

Earlier this month, Citigroup said
United Parcel Service lost computer tapes with sensitive
information from 3.9 million customers of CitiFinancial,
a unit that provides personal and home loans.

There have also been breaches involving other kinds
of sensitive data.

ChoicePoint Inc. (CPS) said in February
that thieves using stolen identities had created 50
dummy businesses that pulled data including names, addresses
and Social Security numbers on as many as 145,000 people.

In March, LexisNexis Inc. disclosed
that hackers had commandeered a database and gained
access to the personal files of as many as 32,000 people.

The company has since increased its estimate of the
people affected to 310,000. Information accessed included
names, addresses and Social Security and driver's license
numbers, but not credit history, medical records or
financial information, corporate parent Reed Elsevier
Group PLC said in a statement.

"Hardly a week goes by without
startling new examples of breaches of sensitive personal
data, reminding us how important it is to pass a comprehensive
identity theft prevention bill in Congress quickly,"
said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

NEW YORK - Oil prices set a new
record of $58.60 a barrel on Friday, after the United
States and other Western nations shut consulates in
oil-producing Nigeria following a terrorist threat.

Concerns about the ability of U.S. refiners to cope
with strong U.S. demand, despite rising fuel costs,
also helped propel prices above the record of $58.28
set in April.

U.S. crude hit the record near the end of Friday's
trading session on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In London, Brent crude also hit an all-time high of
$57.95 a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange,
breaking the former record of $57.65 set in April.

U.S. crude settled at $58.47 a barrel, up $1.89. Brent
settled at $57.76 a barrel, up $1.54.

The new records are for nearest-month futures, which
are July delivery for U.S. crude and August delivery
for Brent. U.S. December crude futures hit a record
of $60.40 a barrel, the all-time high for any monthly
contract.

Worries about security of supply were highlighted by
the closure in Nigeria of the U.S., German and British
consulates in Lagos, after a warning of a terrorist
threat.

Nigeria is the world's eighth-largest crude exporter
and the fifth-biggest exporter oil to the United States.
Its exports to the United States
have risen to 1.1 million barrels per day in the most
recent government statistics -- about 10 percent of
U.S. crude imports.

While there was concern about Nigeria as an oil source,
the country continued to produce and export crude on
Friday.

U.S. authorities shut their consulate after a threat
involving foreign Islamic militants, U.S. military and
diplomatic sources said.

Intelligence information from foreign Islamic militant
channels indicated a specific threat to the U.S. presence
in Nigeria and its Lagos consulate, a diplomatic source
said.

Nigeria has been named by Islamic militant leader Osama
bin Laden as a candidate for "liberation"
and the United States said last month it had uncovered
links between his al Qaeda network and Nigerians.

In a survey of industry executives this week in Boston,
more than half considered "political upheaval in
a strategic country" as the most likely cause of
a disruption in oil supply.

DEMAND STRENGTH

Demand strength also supported prices.

U.S. data this week showed brisk
consumption of transport fuels, renewing concerns about
refiners' ability to meet peak summer gasoline demand
and to build heating OIL and diesel FUEL inventories
for later in the year. [...]

Demand for gasoline over the past four weeks is up
3 percent from a year ago, while consumption of distillates
-- diesel, heating oil and jet fuel -- has risen by
6.5 percent, U.S. government data showed this week.
[...]

A bitter war of words
has erupted among EU states after the failure to reach
an agreement on the union's future budget.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder blamed UK and Dutch
obduracy for one of the EU's "gravest" crises.

UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw expressed sadness, but
said the failure could prove a turning point.

The EU's current president Jean Claude Juncker said he
was ashamed poorer countries had offered to cut their
EU income to reach a deal.

The summit collapsed after Britain refused to accept
a demand by France and some other countries to accept
a reduction in its EU rebate.

The BBC's correspondent in Brussels, William Horsley,
says the recriminations mark perhaps the deepest and most
spectacular bust-up ever in the EU.

It comes just weeks after voters plunged the union into
uncertainty by rejecting its proposed new constitutional
treaty.

UK 'pathetic'

The failure of the talks gave way to verbal sparring,
as France, Germany and Luxembourg rounded on fellow member
states.

French President Jacques Chirac said Britain's behaviour
was "pathetic", adding he was shocked by the
"arrogance of several rich countries" in the
talks.

The UK rejected proposals to limit its annual rebate
without a wider reform of the EU's agricultural subsidies.

Chancellor Schroeder said the summit failed because of
the "totally unaccepting attitude" of Britain
and the Netherlands, while Luxembourg Prime Minister and
EU President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke of a "profound
crisis" in Europe.

Britain, however, defended itself against the criticism,
saying it was not alone in rejecting the proposed deal.

Speaking to the BBC on Saturday, Jack Straw said he was
dismayed but optimistic.

"It is in many ways a sad day for Europe. But out
of this sad day there is an opportunity to reconnect."

He said Britain would take the responsibility of leading
the debate on the EU's future when it assumes the body's
rotating presidency next month, although he conceded the
task would be difficult.

"This will be seen as something of a turning point
for the European Union. Sometimes to secure a turn in
democracies, there has to be a shock," he said.

'Cause for shame'

As the talks disintegrated, 10 EU newcomers from Eastern
Europe offered to cut their funding to salvage a deal,
although their call went unheeded.

Mr Juncker said that only made matters worse.

"When I heard one after the other, all the new member
countries, each poorer than the other, say that in the
interest of reaching an agreement they would be ready
to renounce some of their financial demands, I was ashamed."

But Britain said it has the backing of four or five other
EU states in its rejection of the budget.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said the rebate was needed
to compensate for the distortions caused by agricultural
subsidies, the biggest beneficiary of which is France.

Comment:
As usual, the reports on the meeting put the blame on
different actors depending upon the political positions
of the writers. Chirac is to blame if you support Blair
while it's the Brits if you support Chirac and Schroeder.
With Britain taking up the rotating presidency for the
next six months, it should be amusing to watch.

A phalanx of countries
yesterday announced that they were dropping plans to ratify
the EU constitution, as their leaders agreed that the
prospect of reviving the treaty was close to zero.

Some EU leaders still insisted that the constitution
was not dead and buried, even though the summit collectively
accepted on Thursday that each country could decide to
suspend the ratification process at least until June 2006.

Haggling over the precise summit text on how to respond
to the French and Dutch no votes continued yesterday as
a subsidiary argument to the main battle over the budget.
The draft text spoke of campaigning for the constitution.

"The constitution is not dead and buried,"
said the Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, one
of the strongest advocates of integration.

"It's important that we go ahead
with this," he said. But Sweden and Finland said
they were postponing their parliamentary votes on the
treaty. Ireland and Portugal came to the same conclusion
on Thursday night.

A draft declaration discussed by the leaders yesterday
said that the French and Dutch no votes "do not call
into question either citizens' attachment to the construction
of Europe or its continuing development". The declaration
recommended that the campaign for the constitution "be
intensified and broadened", even though it also announced
a pause.

The French also insisted that the period for reflection
should be active, a phrase designed to suggest that the
constitution was not being put on hold indefinitely.

The leaders agreed to hold a "period
of reflection" to consider the future of European
integration and to decide in June 2006, during the Austrian
presidency of the union, whether to set a new ratification
deadline. Britain would have preferred a more definitive
statement that the constitution was irrecoverable.

The French and Dutch governments were unable to tell
their fellow EU leaders when, if at all, they would hold
fresh referendums on the existing EU constitution text.

The Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson, told Swedish
Radio yesterday: "If they [the French and Dutch governments]
are not ready to go to their people again with a new referendum
about the same constitution, then it has fallen by definition,
and there is no reason for us to start a ratification
process."

Portugal's foreign minister, Jose Socrates, had suggested
the 13 countries which still have to vote on the treaty
should do it at the same time.

ROME, June 17 (AFP)
- Italian newspapers Friday laid into France's President
Jacques Chirac, labelling him an obstacle to the course
of the European Union and calling on Italy to swing over
to Britain's vision of the future of the bloc.

The economic daily Il Sole 24 Ore, in a hard-hitting
front-page editorial, called the French leader "the
enemy of the EU," while Confindustria, organ of the
Italian employers' federation, said Chirac should take
the first step to get Europe out of its current deadlock,
by resigning and vanishing from the political stage.

The left-wing La Repubblica said Chirac, who has failed
to bounce back since French voters shocked him by rejecting
the EU
constitution in a March 29 referendum he had called, was
a beaten man.

"His weakness in France makes him a lame duck in
Europe," the paper said, contrasting him with the
right's rising star, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Renato Brunetta, an economic adviser to Italy's Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi, told La Stampa daily that
the French-German axis within Europe was now dead, adding,
"Italy must support Tony Blair, the only one able
to exercise leadership at present."

Other newspapers agreed, with Il Corriere della Sera
saying that while France's interest in sustaining the
Common Agricultural Policy was well known, "we, who
are losing competitiveness in the markets, have other
interests, other priorities to assert."

Comment:
When you know that the Italian press is mostly owned by
Silvio Berlusconi, you can take these reports with a grain
of salt. Of course Berlusconi is going to work for a tighter
alliance with Blair and Bush and do what he can to isolate
Chirac.

WASHINGTON, June 17
(Xinhuanet) -- The US House of Representatives passed
a bill on Friday that would cut the United States' dues
to the United Nations if the world body does not undergo
tough reforms.

The bill, introduced by Henry Hyde, a Republican who
chairs theHouse International Relations Committee, was
passed as 221 lawmakers were in favor of it and 184 were
against it.

However, the bill is unlikely to become law as the White
House has said it is against it.

The bill demands the United Nations engage in a total
of 39 reforms. If the US secretary of state would not
be able to confirm32 of the 39 reforms by September 2007,
and all 39 reforms by the year 2008, the United States
would halve its dues to the United Nations.

The United States is by far the largest financial contributor
to the United Nations by paying about 22 percent of the
world body's annual general budget of some 2 billion US
dollars.

UNITED NATIONS, June
17 (Xinhuanet) -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said
on Friday that the US Congress' threat to withhold dues
for the United Nations could jeopardize the outcome of
the September summit of the world body.

He issued the warning after the US House of Representatives
voted earlier in the day in favor of a bill, under which
the Congress would withhold half of the US dues for the
United Nations unless it conducts reforms.

He "does not feel that withholding dues is productive
route to achieving reform and indeed that it could jeopardize
the outcome of the Sept. summit," said a statement
released by a UN spokesman.

"The secretary-general is deeply committed to UN
reform," the statement said. "He is undertaking
a number of management reforms and has laid out a broader
agenda of institutional reform and renewal that is being
actively discussed by member states in the run-up to a
'reform summit' of heads of government in September."

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -
Iran headed toward the first runoff presidential election
in its history as a key government official predicted
Saturday none of the seven candidates - including the
favorite contender Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani - would
win enough votes for outright victory.

Turnout in Friday's vote appeared stronger than expected
and polls stayed open an extra four hours, with voting
booths even set up at Tehran's main cemetery for those
paying weekly visits to family graves.

An Interior Ministry official involved in the counting
said a second round of voting would take place June 24,
the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution a second
round of voting has been required. He said the vote-count
he had seen makes it impossible for any one candidate
to collect the required 50 plus one per cent to win.

The results of next week's run-off would decide who inherits
a long list of challenges, including nuclear talks with
the West and demands for reform at home.

Some credited U.S. denunciations of the election for
goading more Iranians to cast ballots after a western-style
campaign that has reshaped Iranian politics. A runoff
would almost certainly include Rafsanjani, a political
veteran and leader of the Islamic Revolution who now portrays
himself as a steady hand for uneasy times.

With 90 per cent of the votes tallied in his home province
Kerman in southern Iran, Rafsanjani took only 45 per cent
of the votes, Rasoul Moazemi, provincial election official,
said. Rafsanjani's son Mahdi, who has been working on
the campaign, said he did not expect his father to win
the 50 per cent of the popular vote he would need to avoid
a run-off.

The bigger question is how voters will treat Rafsanjani's
main rivals: a former police chief backed by conservatives,
and another allied with outgoing president Mohammad Khatami's
stumbling reform movement.

Final results are expected Saturday. [...]

"Fight the enemy by casting a vote," said Iran's
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - head of the non-elected
Islamic theocracy whose near-absolute power can override
both the president and parliament.

After polls closed, Interior Ministry spokesman Johanbakhsh
Khanjani announced turnout in some provinces had exceeded
80 per cent. In others it varied between 65 and 80 per
cent. Turnout reached nearly 67 per cent four years ago
in a Khatami landslide.

All Iranians understood Khamenei's code word for the
United States and other foes of the Islamic system. A
day earlier, President George W. Bush denounced the election
as a futile exercise since the clerics retain the real
power - comments hardliners in Iran said would only inspire
more Iranians to vote.

But many voters appeared to draw most enthusiasm from
the range of choices - a seven-candidate field spanning
from Moin to hardliners with ties to the regime's military
guardians.

Moin, 54, a former culture minister, is considered the
heir of Khatami's eight-year legacy - which permitted
groundbreaking social freedoms such as dating and wide-open
Internet access but failed to chip away at the ruling
clerics' power. Moin has promised to name Khatami's brother
as vice-president. Khatami was prevented from running
for a third term by the Iranian constitution. [...]

NEW YORK One of the
great mysteries of the Nuclear Age was solved today: What
was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper
articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki
following the atomic attack on that city on Aug. 9, 1945?

The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent
for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His
startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected
public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged
from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in
Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just two years
ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy today,
discovered them after the reporter's death.

Four of them were published today for the first time
by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them
from Anthony Weller. He told E&P he hopes to put them
and others together into a book.

The articles published in Japan today reveal a remarkable
and wrenching turn in Weller's view of the aftermath of
the bombing, which anticipates the profound unease in
our nuclear experience ever since. "It was remarkable
to see that shifting perspective," Anthony Weller
says.

An early article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8,
1945 -- two days after he reached the city, before any
other journalist -- hailed the "effectiveness of
the bomb as a military device," as his son describes
it, and makes no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing
properties.

But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and
shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease
X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive
the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the
atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some
with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots
in patches."

The following day he again described the atomic bomb's
"peculiar disease" and reported that the leading
local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these
people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown
radiation effects.

Anthony Weller, a novelist who lives
near Gloucester, Mass., told E&P that it was one of
great disappointments of his father's life that these
stories, "a real coup," were killed by MacArthur
who, George Weller felt, "wanted all the credit for
winning the war, not some scientists back in New Mexico."
Others have suggested that the real reason for the censorship
was the United States did not want the world to learn
about the morally troubling radiation effects for two
reasons: It did not want questions raised about the use
of the weapon in 1945, or its wide scale development in
the coming years.

"Clearly," says Anthony Weller,
"they would have supplied an eyewitness account at
a moment when the American people badly needed one."

***
How did George Weller get the scoop-that-wasn't?

After years of covering the Pacific war, Weller arrived
in Japan with the first wave of reporters and military
in early September. He had already won a Pulitzer for
his reporting in 1943. Appalled by MacArthur's censors,
and "the conformists" in his profession who
went along with strict press restrictions, he made his
way, with permission, to the distant island of Kyushu
to visit a former kamikaze base. But he noted that it
was connected by railroad to Nagasaki. Pretending he was
"a major or colonel," as his son put it, he
slipped into the city (perhaps by boat) about three days
before any of his colleagues, and just after Wilfred Burchett
had filed his first report from Hiroshima.

Once arrived, Weller toured the city, the aid stations,
the former POW camps, and wrote numerous stories within
days. According to his son, he managed to send the articles
to Tokyo, not by wire, but by hand, and felt "that
the sheer volume and importance of the stories would mean
they would be respected" by MacArthur and his censors.

Although Weller did not express any outward disapproval
of the use of the bomb, these stories -- and others he
filed in the following two weeks from the vicinity --
would never see the light of the day, and the reporter
lost track of his carbons. He would later summarize the
experience wit the censorship office in two words: "They
won."

In the years that followed, Weller continued his journalism
career, winning a George Polk award and other honors and
covering many other conflicts. Neither the carbons nor
the originals ever surfaced, before he passed away in
2002 at the age of 95. It was then that his son made a
full search of the wildly disorganized "archives"
at his father's home in Italy, and in 2003 found the carbons
just 30 feet from his dad's desk.

And what a find: roughly 75 pages of stories, on fading
brownish paper, that covered not only his first atomic
dispatches but gripping accounts by prisoners of war,
some of whom described watching the bomb go off on that
fateful morning. Remarkably, Anthony also found a couple
dozen photos his father had snapped in Nagasaki.

Anthony Weller says he attempted to package the material
as a book or a major magazine piece in the States, but
after a slow response, sold a partial package to Mainichi
Shimbun, one of the largest-circulation newspapers in
the world.

***
In the first article published today by the Japanese paper,
the first words from Weller were: "The atomic bomb
may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately,
but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as
merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to
be." Weller described himself as "the first
visitor to inspect the ruins."

He suggested about 24,000 may have died but he attributed
the high numbers to "inadequate" air raid shelters
and the "total failure" of the air warning system.
He declared that the bomb was "a tremendous, but
not a peculiar weapon," and said he spent hours in
the ruins without apparent ill effects. He did note, with
some regret, that a hospital and an American mission college
were destroyed, but pointed out that to spare them would
have also meant sparing munitions plants.

In his second story that day, however, following his
hospital visits, he would describe "Disease X,"
and victims, who have "neither a burn or a broken
limb," wasting away with "blackish" mouths
and red spots, and small children who "have lost
some hair."

A third piece, sent to MacArthur the following day, reported
the disease "still snatching away lives here. Men,
women and children with no outward marks of injury are
dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around
three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.

"The doctors ... candidly confessed ... that the
answer to the malady is beyond them." At one hospital,
200 of 343 admitted had died: "They are dead -- dead
of atomic bomb -- and nobody knows why."

He closed this account with: "Twenty-five Americans
are due to arrive Sept. 11 to study the Nagasaki bomb
site. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for Disease
X."

President's
George Bush's decision not to sign the United States up
to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result
of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful
oil company, and other industries, according to US State
Department papers seen by the Guardian.

The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the
White House for discussions on climate change before next
month's G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of
how close the company is to the administration and its
role in helping to formulate US policy.

In briefing papers given before meetings
to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky,
between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking
Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement"
in helping to determine climate change policy, and also
seeking its advice on what climate change policies the
company might find acceptable.

Other papers suggest that Ms Dobriansky should sound
out Exxon executives and other anti-Kyoto business groups
on potential alternatives to Kyoto.

Until now Exxon has publicly maintained
that it had no involvement in the US government's rejection
of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under
US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is
not the case.

"Potus [president of the United
States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you
[the Global Climate Coalition]," says one briefing
note before Ms Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the
main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated
by Exxon.

The papers further state that the White House considered
Exxon "among the companies most actively and prominently
opposed to binding approaches [like Kyoto] to cut greenhouse
gas emissions".

But in evidence to the UK House of Lords science and
technology committee in 2003, Exxon's head of public affairs,
Nick Thomas, said: "I think we can say categorically
we have not campaigned with the United States government
or any other government to take any sort of position over
Kyoto."

Exxon, officially the US's most valuable company valued
at $379bn (£206bn) earlier this year, is seen in
the papers to share the White House's unwavering scepticism
of international efforts to address climate change.

The documents, which reflect unanimity
between the company and the US administration on the need
for more global warming science and the unacceptable costs
of Kyoto, state that Exxon believes that joining Kyoto
"would be unjustifiably drastic and premature".

This line has been taken consistently by President Bush,
and was expected to be continued in yesterday's talks
with Tony Blair who has said that climate change is "the
most pressing issue facing mankind".

"President Bush tells Mr Blair he's concerned about
climate change, but these documents reveal the alarming
truth, that policy in this White House is being written
by the world's most powerful oil company. This administration's
climate policy is a menace to humanity," said Stephen
Tindale, Greenpeace's executive director in London last
night.

"The prime minister needs to tell
Mr Bush he's calling in some favours. Only by securing
mandatory cuts in US emissions can Blair live up to his
rhetoric," said Mr Tindale.

In other meetings documented in the papers, Ms Dobriansky
meets Don Pearlman, an international anti-Kyoto lobbyist
who has been a paid adviser to the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments,
both of which have followed the US line against Kyoto.

The purpose of the meeting with Mr Pearlman, who also
represents the secretive anti-Kyoto Climate Council, which
the administration says "works against most US government
efforts to address climate change", is said to be
to "solicit [his] views as part of our dialogue with
friends and allies".

ExxonMobil, which was yesterday contacted by the Guardian
in the US but did not return calls, is spending millions
of pounds on an advertising campaign aimed at influencing
politicians, opinion formers and business leaders in the
UK and other pro-Kyoto countries in the weeks before the
G8 meeting at Gleneagles.

Comment:
Of course the Bush Administration took its orders from
Exxon and the oil lobby. You just have to look at the
strong links between the major figures in the Bush government
and the oil lobby to know that is true. Remember Cheney's
energy task force, the secret meetings that were held
with people who could not be named in order to work out
an energy policy for the new administration? Why would
it all have to be so secret if the list of invitations
wasn't made up of Cheney's oil pals?

As to the absurd idea that Bush would ever return the
favour to Tony Blair, it only shows the delusional state
of the British PM: he's lost in wishful thinking and the
illusion of his own importance.

(CNN) -- Millions
of people could lose their homes and livelihoods as the
world's deserts expand because of climate change and unsustainable
human activities, an environmental report warned on Friday.

The report, part of a series examining the state of the
world's biological resources, was released on the eve
of "World Day to Combat Desertifcation," which
marks the 11th anniversary of a UN agreement to tackle
spreading deserts.

But Zafar Adeel of the United Nations University International
Network on Water, Environment and Health, an expert on
water management and a leading author of the report, warned
that more needed to be done to combat desertification.

"Desertification has emerged as a global problem
affecting everyone," said Adeel. "There are
serious gaps in our understanding of how big deserts are,
and how they are growing."

Drylands, which range from "dry sub-humid"
to "hyper-arid" regions, make up more than 40
percent of the world's land surface and are home to two
billion people. The largest area stretches from Saharan
Africa across the Middle East and Central Asia into parts
of China.

Most of Australia is also classified as drylands, along
with much of the western U.S., parts of southern Africa,
and patches of desert in South America.

The report said that that up to 20 percent of those areas
had already suffered some loss of plant life or economic
use as a consequence of desertification.

It said that global warming was likely
to exacerbate the problem, causing more droughts, heat
waves and floods.

But human factors have also played their part, with over-grazing,
over-farming, misuse of irrigation and the unsustainable
demands of a growing population all contributing to environmental
degradation.

Adeel warned that some of the world's poorest populations
were likely to be among the worst affected, with large
swathes of Central Asia and the areas to the north and
south of the Sahara in danger of becoming unsuitable for
farming.

"Without strong efforts to reverse desertification,
some of the gains we've seen in development in these regions
may be reversed," he said.

Desertification has also been linked to health problems
caused by dust storms, poverty and a drop in farm production,
with infant mortality in drylands double the rate elsewhere
in developing nations.

But the problem causes dangerous changes to the environment
on a global scale, the report warned, with dust storms
in the Gobi and Sahara deserts blamed for respiratory
problems in North America and damage to coral reefs in
the Caribbean. Scientists estimate that a billion tons
of dust from the Sahara are lifted into the atmosphere
each year.

While very difficult to reverse, the report said that
specific local strategies should be employed to tackle
spreading deserts. Alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism
and fish farming could provide an alternative to intensive
crop farming, while better management of crops and irrigation
and the adoption of alternative energy sources such as
solar power would all contribute to environmental sustainability.

The first Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, released
in March, warned that approximately 60 percent of the
ecosystem supporting life on Earth was being degraded
or used unsustainably and that the consequences of degradation
could grow significantly worse in the next half century.

Ancient Egyptians made
glass out of raw materials more than 3,000 years ago,
say archeologists working in the eastern Nile delta.

Since Bronze-Age glass was first discovered in the late-19th
century, scientists have disagreed about whether the Egyptian
artifacts were made from scratch or with reworked materials.

In ancient times, glass was considered a valuable commodity.
The fragile material was used to make vividly coloured
artifacts, boosting the power, status and political allegiances
of the elite, archeologists said.

Now Thilo Rehren of University College, London, and Edgar
Pusch of Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim say they've found
fragments from at least 250 crucibles at a glassworks.

The find at Qantir-Piramesses dates to the 13th century
BC.

Glass was made by melting quartz in the crucibles in
a two-stage process, the pair report in Friday's issue
of the journal Science.

In the first step, glass was heated at low temperatures
in oval crucibles, which were then shattered to get the
glass out.

Next, the material was coloured and melted to form glass
ingots in cylindrical molds.

Glass from the workshops was then finished into objects
at other locations that lacked the key cylindrical vessels
needed for glass making, the researchers said.

Significantly, much of the glass was red, which requires
using copper in a technologically sophisticated process.

"Rehren and Pusch convincingly show that the Egyptians
were making their own glass in specialized facilities
that were under royal control," wrote archeologist
Caroline Jackson of the University of Sheffield in England
in a journal commentary.

"At Qantir, production was linked specifically to
the use of copper to colour the glasses either red or
blue, and glass was manufactured in the form of ingots
to be reworked elsewhere."

The pair's research was funded by the German Research
Council and the British Academy.

This May was a time
of great disillusionment for Russians. Years have passed
since they parted with Communism, broke up the Soviet
Union, granted independence to (or gave away to the US)
every land they ever controlled, allowed Western companies
to buy and sell their heirlooms and livelihood, closed
down their military bases, let their missiles and submarines
rust in peace, fulfilled every demand and desire of the
US. Then they prepared a great celebration of V-Day, invited
guests, brushed up their medals, retold the stories of
supreme heroism – and were cold-shouldered by the
US and UK, their erstwhile allies in the World War II.
President Bush, tactful as ever, went to Tbilisi and declared
that there was no big difference between Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia.

“O God, why did we fight for them?” thought
many Russians. “Why did we support the Anglo-American
landing in Normandy instead of signing a separate peace
treaty with practically defeated Germany in the spring
of 1944, when our territory was liberated? Why did so
many Russian soldiers have to fight and die while liberating
Poland or Czechoslovakia or West Ukraine? Now we see that
the Czechs and the Poles prefer German hegemony; they
let them in via the EU treaty. The West Ukraine celebrates
their volunteers in the SS division and pushes for NATO
membership. We could let them have it their way; stay
put behind the old borders and let the Wehrmacht deal
with Private Ryan.”

If time messaging were possible, have no doubt –
that is what would happen in 1944; and we would be living
today in a different world. In that alternative world,
the Russians would not have to listen to the complaints
of an American president about why they were so rough
with their enemy.

Such grossly unjust philippics appear in the Western
media because the Western and the Eastern visions of the
War differ greatly. For the Russians and their neighbours,
the important thing was their great victory over the German
enemy; but in the West, the Jewish holocaust blotted out
the victory of Stalingrad and Berlin. The West adopted
a strange narrative centred on the Jewish fate. According
to this narrative, the Germans decided to exterminate
all Jews, from babies to the old men; that is why they
fought the war. The world callously disregarded the Jewish
tragedy, but a miracle occurred: Jews were saved and created
their state of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust.

From the Russian point of view, the USSR did not ‘callously
disregard’, but shed the blood of its best sons
and daughters. The war was not fought for Jews or because
of Jews; but Russia deserves their eternal gratitude anyway
for saving them from their peril. Because of this claim
on Jewish gratitude, the Russians went a long way with
the creators of the holocaust narrative; but Jewish gratitude
was extremely short-lived (as it usually is – google
up my essay Prince Charming).

In the present Jewish narrative that became the official
version of modern history in the West thanks to efforts
of Jewish media lords, the USSR/Russia is conspicuous
by its absence. Even the Americans appear in this story
as people who failed to bomb Auschwitz and supplied their
know-how to the Germans. In the
endless corridors of the Yad va-Shem Holocaust Memorial
in Jerusalem, the Red Army is not even mentioned. Millions
of perished Russian soldiers find no place in the Zionist
narrative of the Jewish tragedy, Jewish heroic fight and
an indifferent gentile world.

The American and European leaders fully accepted the
Jewish narrative, not least because it released them from
their obligations towards the ally that shouldered the
immense burden of the war. They watched with incomprehension
and irritation the V-Day celebrations in Moscow. For them,
the key event took place a few months earlier in Auschwitz:
as opposed to Moscow, none failed to appear there and
to ask for Jewish forgiveness. For them, the Jewish tragedy
was the only important event of 1945; as for victory –
what victory?

That Victory was stolen. In Israel this May 9 they spoke
of the heroism of Jewish soldiers and partisans, as if
they had won the war single-handedly. The Israeli school
syllabus does not refer to the War except in the context
of the holocaust. Israeli well-nurtured ignorance is complete:

A Russian student wrote a thesis on the
Battle of Moscow, in the winter 1941, and mentioned it
while meeting with the Israeli students in Tel Aviv. “Who
actually fought whom at Moscow in 1941?” asked an
Israeli youth. After a brief silence, an Israeli teacher
explained: the Germans fought the Japanese!

Thus the story of the Jewish holocaust obscured the war
and the Soviet victory. The Western anti-communists wanted
to steal the victory; the Zionists helped them while minding
their own interests. Now they collect billions in reparations,
while the heroic feat of our fathers is forgotten. For
me, a dweller of Jaffa, this turn of events recalls the
myth of Perseus and his victory over the Sea Monster.
You probably remember how the Sea Monster threatened Jaffa
with destruction lest the Princess Andromeda were delivered
into his paws; how Perseus beheaded the Medusa Gorgona,
donned the winged sandals of Hermes, flew to Jaffa and
turned the Sea Monster into stone, thus saving Princess
Andromeda.

Now imagine that a few years after this exploit, a young
man named Jason decided to check the story and have a
peek at the Princess. He gathered his friends, young Athenian
gentlemen with much spare time on their hands, and sailed
his black ship east. Winds and currents were favourable,
and the ship reached Jaffa safely and speedily. If the
Athenians had any doubts about Perseus’s veracity,
these were dispelled most convincingly: the vast bulk
of the sea monster was beached on the rocks a hundred
yards from the shore, thus creating a cosy nook of a harbour.
(It is still here, and is shown to tourists).

In a café serving local arrack, a fiery, milky
drink not dissimilar to the Hellene Ouzo, the Athenians
enquired about the Sea Monster.

“Yes, this skeleton is timeless reminder of the
great lizard tragedy,” said the barman.

“What lizard tragedy?” asked a sailor.

“The Monster was devouring the lizards,”
said the barman. “The lizards, these harmless, exquisite
and gracious creatures, were his favourite food. Every
day he would swallow them by thousands. The lizards would
be eliminated if the Monster were not slain. Until now,
we have a Lizard tragedy remembrance day, and here is
the memorial of the Devoured Lizard.”

Indeed, our sailors had not noticed until now a modest
sculpture embellishing the city square. It depicted a
lizard in a tortured pose, his tail gone and small paws
raised to the blue Jaffa sky.

“Strange! We have never heard of this lizard angle
from Perseus,” muttered Jason.

“Ah, Perseus!” exclaimed the barman. “He
never cared for lizards. There are dreadful stories that
he killed many lizards himself. When he carelessly flashed
his weapon, the Medusa head, thousands of lizards were
turned into stone. Some people say that Perseus was not
better than the dragon.”

The barman’s son intruded into their conversation,
“We learned in school that this Perseus was very
weak on morals, too. He had many sordid adventures, took
advantage of the old women Graiae, assassinated the poor
Gorgon in her sleep; and worse -- he murdered his own
father!”

“He was a mass murderer,” intervened another
Jaffaite, busy with his arrack and olives, “he murdered
his mother’s suitor Polydectes and many others by
means of the same Gorgon head. Perseus is not our hero,
just remember it!”

“Every time we look at our harbour and see the
Monster, we bless the Almighty God for saving the lizards,”
piously intoned a priest.

“But he vanquished the dragon!” – bellowed
Jason.

“The dragon was defeated by the joint efforts of
brave lizards and their human friends. Perseus played
but a minor role in this drama. Anyone could do what he
did: he just flashed the Medusa head at the dragon and
turned it into stone. But before that, our Allied forces
carried out a dangerous and brutal war; thousands of lizards
attacked the monster, and we all prayed for the Monster’s
end. Don’t you think that our prayers should be
mentioned first as the greatest reason for victory?”

“But why are we talking about defeating the dragon?”
asked the barman’s son. “The dragon was defeated
by everybody and anyway, the important story is that of
the Lizards’s Tragedy. And Perseus is not our hero.”

“Are you Lizards?” asked daring Jason.

“Oh no, we are humans. But the lizards are the
best thing that ever happened to us. We always follow
their advice.”

“And what happened to Andromeda?” –
asked Jason.

“Nothing special. Her house is out there, on Lizards
Street.”

The sailors paid for their drinks and proceeded to the
house which the barman pointed out. Andromeda the Beautiful
was there. She was obviously astonished when the sailors
brought her the regards of Perseus.

“It seems the people of Jaffa forgot who saved
them from the Dragon. But you, Andromeda, surely you remember
Perseus who saved you?” asked Jason.

“Perseus?” asked the Princess, gazing through
the window at the monument of the Devoured Lizard. “Perseus?
He never cared about the Lizards.”

The Greek team rose and departed back home in visible
disgust. Since then, mankind has been divided into those
who read the story of Perseus the Victorious, and those
who worship the Devoured Lizard. [...]

Former Russian prime
minister Yevgeny Primakov says that any interference in
foreign states, including pre-emptive strikes on terrorists,
must first be sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

The former Russian official is known for turning his
Washington-bound aircraft back to Moscow in protest at
the start of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

Primakov, who now occupies a seat in the UN Council of
Sages, said in an interview with the Politichesky Zhurnal
magazine that this body had prepared a report to the UN
Secretary General in which it called for a change of attitude
towards the possibility of interference in other countries’
internal affairs, including pre-emptive strikes on terrorist
bases.

Today the UN attitude towards this issue was very negative
— interference was not allowed in any way. Now the
position must change, but such interference must be first
sanctioned by the UN Security Council and the criteria
for the decision must be pre-defined, Primakov said.

“This is definitely a step forward,” Primakov
said speaking of the suggestions.

A member of the Ukrainian
parliament Vladimir Sivkovich demands that U.S. ambassador
to Kiev, John Herbst, be expelled for interfering in the
country’s internal affairs, Interfax news agency
reported.

Sivkovich claims that the ambassador has broken the Vienna
Convention on Consular Relations and says he is going
to make a request for an appreciation of Herbst’s
activities from the U.S. Congress.

According to the recently published text
of a tapped telephone conversation between Herbst and
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun,
the U.S. ambassador asked the senior official to release
a U.S. preacher detained in Ukraine and promised Piskun
political asylum in the U.S. if he is ever victimized
by his political opponents.

Earlier this month Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s
office launched a criminal case into the taping of the
controversial telephone conversation.

WEST PARK, Fla. (AP)
-- A Fort Lauderdale man died after Broward sheriff's
deputies shocked him with a Taser. Officers had been
responding to a call about a home invasion in West Park.

The homeowner says 48-year-old Horace Owens broke in
while he was watching television. He says the intruder
ran from room to room yelling, in these words, "Please
don't let them kill me."

Deputies got Owens outside, but he struggled with them.
He was hit with the electrical shock outside the house.
Officers tried to resuscitate Owens, but he was pronounced
dead later at the hospital.

Owens is the seventh person to die in South Florida
after being shocked by a Taser since 2002.

Comment:Latest
reports on this most recent extra-judicial killing
tell us that the heart attack that the victim suffered
was caused by the cocaine that the coroner found in
his blood rather than the 50,000 volts from the Taser.
This is surely good news for the millions of Americans
that already have a heart condition or who have ingested
any of the millions of legal stimulants prescribed by
their doctors because they need never worry about bearing
the shame of having 'death by Taser' printed on their
death certificate.

Recently the Boston
Phoenix's Adam Reilly took a gander at Dominos founder
Tom Monaghan's plans for a Catholic "utopia"
in Florida.

Ave Maria won’t be just a university, he continues.
It will also be a new town, built from scratch, in which
the wickedness of the world will be kept at bay. "We’ve
already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site
about buying a home there — you know, they’re
all Catholic," Monaghan says excitedly. "We’re
going to control all the commercial real estate, so
there’s not going to be any pornography sold in
this town. We’re controlling the cable system.
The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms
or dispense contraceptives." A private chapel will
be located within walking distance of each home. At
the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will
be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on. "So,"
Monaghan concludes, with just a hint of understatement,
"it’ll be a unique town." As he exits
the stage, the applause is thunderous.

This isn't just a pizza baron's daydream. Tom Monaghan
has influential friends in high places. Antonin Scalia
and the pope's old pal Reverend Joseph Fessio are just
two of his many upper crust Catholic buds.

This puts Fessio in a remarkably prominent position
in American Catholicism, and will surely help Monaghan
as he markets Ave Maria in the coming years. But liberal
American Catholics will likely find Fessio’s rise
discouraging. Last month, I asked Fessio if American
Catholics are obligated to embrace a specific political
identity. "I can’t give you a yes-or-no answer
to that," he replied — and then, for all
intents and purposes, he did exactly that. "I think
it’s more difficult for someone who’s trying
to live his life consistently with the Catholic faith
to vote for Democratic candidates, because the party’s
platform includes things which are clearly against Catholic
teaching, such as abortion and homosexual marriage and
so on," Fessio said. True, he continued, Democrats
support the welfare state and Republicans do not —
but despite the Church’s doctrine of a "preferential
option for the poor," Fessio refused to call this
a Democratic strength. "These are things which
the Catholic Church can accept different points of view
on," he claimed, somewhat mysteriously. Later,
Fessio insisted that any Catholic politician who supports
legalized abortion should be denied communion. "This
is a very simple question, a question of integrity and
consistency and identity," he argued. "Look
— if you are sincerely convinced, that’s
fine. I won’t vote for you. But please don’t
call yourself a Catholic in good standing. And don’t
behave in such a way that would give the impression
that you are."

Although there is no mention of cheesy bread communion
wafers, the entire article is worth a read. Just don't
get your hopes up. Monaghan doesn't appear to be planning
on setting aside one of the houses of the holy for the
winner of an updated Find the Popes in the Pizza Contest.

Women's football could
make money by promoting the players' physical attributes,
the president of Uefa, European football's governing body,
said yesterday.

In an interview with Radio 5
Live about tomorrow's Euro 2005 final, Lennart Johansson
said: "Companies could make
use of a sweaty, lovely-looking girl playing on the
ground. It would sell."

Only moments earlier, he had criticised comments made
by Sepp Blatter, his Fifa counterpart, who once called
for "tighter shorts" in the women's game.
Strangely, Mr Johansson felt Mr Blatter had overstepped
the mark.

It is a sight to cheer
Texan politicians who have been trying to ban raunchy
cheerleading from their schools. Just a half-hour drive
from the home of the famously hot-panted, crop-topped
and raunchy Dallas Cowgirls, more than 270 fresh-faced
girls are cheering for a higher purpose.

Unlike the girls who turn out for the Dallas Cowboys
American football team, their outfits are modest and
their moves are clean.
Cheerleader being flung into the air

Summer camp, which started this week across America,
will be busier than ever for the evangelist Federation
of Christian Cheerleaders. It already has 15,000 members
and is growing, while a similar organisation, Christian
Cheerleaders of America, has 7,000.

The recent complaint by Al Edwards, a Texas Democrat,
that "overtly sexually suggestive" cheerleading
was undermining high school morality has focused attention
on the Christian alternative.

At the FCC's camp at Southwestern Assemblies of God
University in Waxahachie, students aged nine to 18 spent
this week learning how Christian values can even play
a part in the secular pursuit of cheering on your school
football or basketball team.

Stephanie Frank, 23, the camp's director, said: "We
are teaching them that the talents that God has given
them in cheerleading can be upheld in his ministry.
We challenge them to break that stereotype of a ditz
in a short skirt."

Deani Merrell coaches the Christian Heritage Academy
team from Del City, Oklahoma.
"We want our girls to represent the Lord in a way
pleasing to him," she said.

"We want to know when we walk off the pitch that
we haven't offended anybody."

Serious practitioners of cheerleading are no longer
content simply to look decorative as they encourage
the boys from the touchline.

Miss Frank says the routines she teaches are "cutting
edge but clean and appropriate". The backing music
is rap and hard rock but with Christian lyrics. Hip
gyrations and chest shimmying is cut to a minimum.

There is no FCC dress code but
most Christian squads specify that skirts must be between
4in and 7in above the knee when kneeling, and midriffs
and shoulders must be covered up. When hosting
competitions involving secular teams, the Christian
teams often offer to pray with their non-religious competitors
before it starts.

But, as religion is banned in state
schools, Christian cheerleaders have to be careful about
using the "J" word. Camp teaches religious
"fun cheers" such as "Hip Hop, Jesus
Rocks, Let Me See That Left Foot Drop," but they
are "supplementary" to standard refrains like
"G-O, Let's Go".

CHICAGO (Reuters)
- A coalition that would for the first time unite the
major Christian faiths in the United States is taking
years to coalesce, but its organizers say that's a good
sign and are not discouraged.

One day the group could speak with a single voice on
important issues in a country of 296 million where historically
three of every four people claim to be Christian or
at least identify with that faith.

The group, Christian Churches Together in the USA,
began in 2001 when more than two dozen church leaders
met to find a way to spread the patchwork quilt of U.S.
churches on a single table.

They range from Bible Belt Baptists and black Protestants
to Orthodox ethnics to more ritualized Episcopalians
and Catholics. Historic suspicions and theological divisions
have often kept them fragmented.

Organizers had spoken of formalizing the group this
spring, with a public debut worship service in Washington
in the autumn. But a steering committee meeting in California
earlier this month instead produced a decision to meet
again for further work in the spring of 2006. [...]

Comment: "And
the deluded, the mesmerised, the witless, the loopers
shall come together as one voice and having subverted
the pre-ordained and righteous use of their asses, they
shall begin to spake nonsense out of them onto the nations
and many shall be convinced and thereby deceived."
Eclesiasticusfantasticus 10:2

Two friends on a night
fishing expedition in the wine town of Eger took six photos
of a unidentified flying object believed to be a, er,
UFO, rtlklub.hu
reports. The photos were taken by two men - who are only
identified as Tibor and Ferenc in the accompanying
video - while they were fishing on a lake formed by an
abandoned mine. The pictures show a bright object in different
positions in the dark sky. Nobody knows what the thing
was, but, say Tibor, Ferenc and others, it was clearly
not a disco laser or car headlight. "The light came from
the inside of it," Tibor said. "It had volume, it was
three-dimensional. If I compare it to the moon, its light
was much stronger. It was right ahead of us, 150 meters
away."

The two men arrived at the lake at around 9:30 p.m on
the evening of May 24. Only a few minutes had passed when
the object appeared and flew towards them without making
a sound. Then it suddenly stopped and disappeared behind
the forest. The electric discharge of the object caused
Tibor's watch to stop, and the two men lost their sense
of time and space. Meanwhile, the bright light frightened
animals in the area; Tibor's dog ran to the forest whining
and wasn't found until fifteen minutes later, cowering
in a hole in a tree trunk.

"Now I think that [aliens] exist," Tibor said. "When
the time comes, they show themselves. This was the time.
I have to admit, the hair on my arm still stands up when
we talk about it."

One of Hungary's
leading UFO experts, Tibor SÃ³s, who has analyzed
more than 100 UFO sightings over the past fifteen years,
said the photos weren't manipulated. "Whatever it was,
the typical saucer shape can be seen on it. The diameter
is about eight or ten meters." SÃ³s took a reading of radiation
in the area, which he said was normal, indicating that
the UFO didn't land.

SÃ³s also said that he believes aliens are friendly, but
just don't like to be seen. Which seems odd, given some
of the things other Magyars who have had close
encounters of the UFO kind have told the Szeged-based
alienist. In fact, it makes us wonder if someone should
be taking a closer look at him.